Vietnam’s Cyberspace: Celebrating 25 Years of Internet Connection

“The decision to join the global Internet 25 years ago demonstrated the courage, the foresight, and the actively integrating, contributing strategy to comprehensively changing the socio-economic life made by the Party and State and leaders of the information and communication industry,” said Deputy Minister of Information and Communications Pham Duc Long at the ceremorny to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Vietnam’s Internet and Internet Day 2022.

The ceremony was organized by the Department of Telecommunications, Vietnam Internet Center (Ministry of Information and Communications) and Vietnam Internet Association on Dec 7 in Hanoi, to mark a milestone for the development of the digital economy and digital society in Vietnam.

Deputy Minister of Information and Communications Pham Duc Long speaks at the Program to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Vietnam’s Internet and Internet Day 2022 (Photo: Hang Tran).

Notably, the domain name “.vn” has the largest number of registered users in Southeast Asia and top ten in the Asia Pacific.

According to the recent released Google’s e-Conomy SEA 2022, the number of domain names reached 564,444 domain names, about 1000 times higher than in the early days of Vietnam’s Internet. The report also predicts Vietnam taking the lead in Southeast Asia’s Internet economy.

Broadband infrastructure has covered 99.73% of villages nationwide; 19.79 million households have fiber optic cable, reaching 72.4%. Fiber optic cable system has been deployed to 100% of communes, wards and townships, 91% of villages, 100% of schools, reported by Bnews

In Vietnam, the current number of mobile phone subscribers using smartphones is 94.2 million; the number of mobile broadband subscribers is 82.2 million, taking account for 74.3% of the population. The level of IP usage (IPv4, IPv6) is in the top 20-30 countries globally, the IPv6 application rate in Vietnam reaches 53% with more than 50 million IPv6 users, the top 10 leading countries in the world in IPv6 conversion .

Developing a digital economy in Vietnam

In 2020, the Vietnamese internet economy continued to record double-digit growth, at 16 percent year-on-year, the highest in Southeast Asia. (Photo: VNA

According to Deputy Minister Pham Duc Long, Vietnam’s Internet businesses are also transforming their models from infrastructure business development to platform business development.

Over 25 years of development, Vietnam’s Internet has transformed from a communication infrastructure into Digital infrastructure includes broadband telecommunications infrastructure, cloud computing infrastructure, Internet of things infrastructure, infrastructure for providing technology such as services, infrastructure for digital platforms.

Deputy Minister Pham Duc Long stressed that, in earlier stage, the Internet connection was used as a tool for socio-economic development. Nowadays, the Internet will create a new development method for socio-economic development.

Vietnam’s goal is to build an Internet infrastructure that is technologically autonomous, widespread, modern and secure; to promote and protect the security of data flow. Internet users are responsible for building and developing a safe and sustainable Internet in Vietnam, developing a digital life for the digital transformation period, leading the process of integrating the Internet into all socio-economic development activities.