Myanmar’s Telecommunication Breakthrough The new millennium brought with it a technological leap that made computers, mobile phones and Internet access widely available. While access to the Internet proliferated worldwide, few people in Myanmar had access to a landline. Myanmar was entering its fifth decade of isolation imposed by the military junta, which seized power in 1962. Since the early 2010s, economic liberalization reforms brought smartphones and the Internet into households, as well as double-edged societal change. Before 2008, a year of significance in Myanmar, with Cyclone Nargis bringing death, but having a profound impact on society at large, ordinary post-paid SIM cards were officially sold at around 1,500,000 MMK (USD 1,500), a price unheard of in the rest of the world. SIM Cards and landlines in Myanmar were not only extremely expensive but also very difficult to get, resulting in long waiting lists. Some people with connections to military circles obtained SIM cards and then resold them on the black market at twice the official price to the select few who could afford it. At the end of 2008, the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), which ruled Myanmar between 1997 and early 2011, introduced the first prepaid Global System for Mobile (GSM)/Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) phone cards in a few City Mart shops in Yangon and Mandalay. The cards were again sold at twice the official price by most retailers, for between USD 50 and USD 250. In neighboring Southeast Asian countries, they had already been available for several years at less than USD 20, still costing the average monthly income of a manual worker in Myanmar. As they remained too expensive for most people, the government distributed some cards to registered citizens via ward offices through a "lucky draw" system. Every month, two to five cards per town were distributed by local administrations. The winners usually chose to resell them because the 2G Internet was too slow to be of any use, because they had no one to call, and because they could get 100,000 MMK for it. In 2010, before the elections of November 7 that would pave the way for the transition of the 2010s, only 1% of the population had a mobile phone subscription. An hour's use of the Internet cost 500 MMK on average and was only available in a few computer shops in urban areas. Calls were equally costly at an estimated 540 MMK or 0.30 USD per minute. According to Freedom House, in 2013, when the population was estimated to be around 52 million, there were approximately 1 million Internet users in Myanmar. In 2012, President Thein Sein initiated a series of economic liberalization reforms, including the end of ​the monopoly of state-owned Myanmar Posts and Telecommunications (MPT), giving way to foreign business and investment in the country. Two years later, Norway’s Telenor and Qatari Ooredoo obtained initial licenses to start operations. Viettel, a conglomerate under the 2