Residential Internet Plans in Myanmar – May 2018

As the second quarter is already going for a while, it was high time we release our new price comparison for residential Internet plans in Myanmar.

The competition among Internet service providers in Myanmar is still fierce and prices are going down at a rapid and uncontrollable pace.

Myanmarnet in trouble

Myanmarnet is still leading the pack and recently hit a floor price of 8,500Ks for 1mbps which is hard to compete with. The ISP has recently teamed up with Telenor to provide a unique offering to the market: Wifi Offload.

Sadly, Myanmarnet popularity is hitting rock bottom and especially on the social networks where more and more angry customers complain about network performance. The service provider is suspected to delete negative comments from its official page to hide the hard truth. Problem is that the technology deployed by Myanmarnet is not scalable and it will be extremely complicated and costly for the service provider to improve the network quality.

5BB on the rise

5BB Broadband strongly benefits from Myanmarnet performance issues to gain popularity. The fiber provider is praised for good quality and excellent customer service. 5BB also maintains a firm and steady pricing strategy imperturbable to the rapid evolution of the market.

Behind the two leaders, different strategies are developed by local service providers to stay afloat in the market. Welink for instance decided to expand to cities where the competition is not as aggressive. Same strategy for AGB which recently claimed to cover nine cities outside Yangon: Myitkyina, Muse, Lashio, Monywa, Mandalay, NayPyiTaw, Taunggyi, Pyay and MawLaMyine.

Speednet and Truenet are taking the risky bet to consolidate their activities in Yangon downtown which is also a strong position for Myanmarnet.

As of MPT, the public state operator has launched a trial in Mandalay. Its FTTH coverage in Yangon is still extremely limited.

Still in Mandalay, Ooredoo is showing a very positive growth thanks to its partnership with Yatanarpon Teleport.

Finally, Telenor improves its Fiber to the Home plans by including unlimited subscription to iflix free of charge.

If we take a close look at the market price evolution since January 2017, the trend is quite shocking. The average price per mbps has been divided by 4 in less than 18 months!

As the ARPU will now stabilize and more likely increase slightly, we foresee the price per mbps to keep going down as the broadband plans become bigger and bigger. The local broadband players need to slowly bridge the gap with 4G which is easier said than done considering Myanmar 4G has become one of the fastest in the world.

Ananda, better late than never

After months of waiting, Ananda has finally launched services in Yangon this friday. We will release a separate article to dissect the 4G operator commercial strategy.

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Last but not least our comparison table on the unlimited Internet plans currently available in the market. Ananda gets into our price table with an arbitrary speed of 20 mbps although the package is said to be unlimited.

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