telecommunications infrastructure and services in locations that are unlikely to attract sufficient private investment.” 119 The Current State of Internet Infrastructure and Internet Services The nation-wide rollout of telecommunications networks in Myanmar comes at a time when the reach of the global Internet has reached an unprecedented scale. Globally, there are now more Internet-connected devices than people. 120 Many users in Myanmar are connecting to the Internet for the first time. While mobile penetration has steadily increased following the Ministry’s liberalisation of the sector, fixed-line Internet penetration remains low. The 2014 Census reports that as of March-April 2014 only 6.2% of the population had access to the Internet at home. 121 ISPs have struggled to balance Myanmar’s limited Internet capacity with customer demand. In November 2014, MPT and Yatanarpon Teleport stopped accepting applications for new fibre connections, in order to concentrate on increasing capacity of existing connections. 122 Internet Rollout While new mobile towers have improved voice coverage nationally, Internet speed remains poor due to the quality of Myanmar’s underlying Internet backbone and an immense demand for Internet services. Connectivity to the global Internet is important, because the majority of content users are attempting to access is hosted on servers outside Myanmar. This includes Myanmar specific content and international software services. For example, the popular Myanmar language news site “7 Day News” is currently hosted on servers maintained by Amazon Web Services in Singapore. 123 For many Myanmar companies, the decision to host their website outside Myanmar is due to lower cost and increased reliability of electricity. Popular services such as Facebook, Google Search and Gmail, YouTube, and Viber also require international Internet access. These services connect with servers located outside of Myanmar, where data is stored and processed. For example, Google currently has 13 data centres globally, all located outside of Myanmar. As far back as the 1990s, the workings of the Internet backbone were compared to a road freeway or highway system by experts and politicians. 124 One component of a strong backbone is the collection of fibre optic cables that can be either submarine or terrestrial. The way information travels along these cables and is routed to different places is similar to vehicles travelling along lanes on a highway. Not only does Myanmar currently have a limited number of lanes for information to travel around the country, Myanmar also has a limited number of lanes connecting users to the global Internet. Myanmar is currently served by only one submarine Internet cable, South East Asia-Middle East-WesternEurope-3. Myanma Posts and Telecommunications (MPT) is a member of global 119 See MCIT, “Invitation for Expression of Interest: Myanmar’s Universal Service Strategy” (6 Aug. 2015). See: https://www.apnic.net/ 121 The Republic of the Union of Myanmar, “the 2014 Myanmar Population and Housing Census, Census Report Volume 2-A” (May 2015). 122 Aung Kyaw Nyunt, “Fiber Connection Freeze from Leading ISPs”, Myanmar Times (November 2014). 123 See Website and IP location at http://check-host.net/ip-info?host=http://www.7daydaily.com/. 124 See US Vice President Al Gore’s “Speech at Royce Hall, UCLA Los Angeles, California” (11 January 1994). See also Page 6, Nicholas Economides, “The Economics of the Internet Backbone” (2005). 120 CHAPTER 3: SECTOR-LEVEL IMPACTS 93 3