The cities offer some free Wi-Fi hotspots in hotels, cafes or airports, as well as higher incomes
areas, while the countryside is once again disproportionately impacted by the turnback. The
cost hike in July only targeted phone data, but then in September, at-home Wi-Fi and Fiber
packages prices also shot up, at the great despair of the informant from Rakhine. “We can’t
install Wi-Fi because my house sits between two hills, and the lines are not there. I asked my
friend who has Wi-Fi if I could come to his home to follow my lessons, but he told me that he
will cancel his subscription because the line connection is poor and because he can’t afford it
anymore. It tripled to 75,000 MMK per month for all operators except Mytel, which kept it at
25,000 MMK for now. They want to take everything from us and force us to support their
companies.”
The culmination of the coup, the incessant Internet and electricity cuts, the rising poverty as
well as the risks of communicating on the phone, meant a sharp downturn in profit for
telecommunications operators. All Myanmar-based operators chose to suspend their
investments and steadily raise the price of data packages for Internet access as an attempt to
limit their losses from July. The one exception is Mytel, the joint venture between Vietnam and
Myanmar military officials. Mytel offered discounts as an attempt to keep its previous ten
million customer base after being targeted by a widely followed boycott campaign.
Since the coup, Mytel has been at the center
of an intense political and economic clash.
"As of August 2021, MytelPay, Easy Pay and
MPT Money are on the Civil Disobedience
Movement’s (CDM) list of boycotted entities,
along with Asian Green Development Bank,
the two military-owned banks and four stateowned
banks,”
according
to
IEM’s
“Myanmar’s Banking Crisis”.
The Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB)
describes Mytel as "nothing but the
Tatmadaw in commercial form. Representing
a serious conflict of interest, tenders for the
erection of towers were famously given to a
company owned by Min Aung Hlaing [4] ’s
daughter and National Tower Development,
another Singapore venture with links—
through director Patrick Aung—to Burmese
arms seller Aero Sofi. Mytel has also been
accused of land rights abuses, including
illegally developing infrastructure on ethnic
Kayin land."
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