LIKE all news from the capital not beamed out by the New Light of Myanmar, it’s taken a while for it to become general knowledge that mobile telephones will now be working in Nay Pyi Taw.
But they are. And have been since the start of this month, with sales of prepaid mobile cards and CDMA 450Mhz phones booming ever since, said a number of local shopkeepers.
The CDMA network has been working ever since Myanma Posts and Telecommunications set up signal transmission towers in Lai Way and Tatkone in the region, which came on-line on October 9.
Local store owners, ever watchful, noticed the works and began buying up prepaid phone cards and mobile phones from dealers in Yangon and Mandalay to take advantage of the service.
“I sold about 10 cards on the very first day I got them but had ordered those cards well before that because I’d heard the network was up and running. We sell handsets priced between K60,000 and K200,000 each,” said Ko Win Htun, the owner of Chain Tan Pi teashop in Pyinmana.
“So far we’ve sold about 30 prepaid cards and 30 handsets,” he added.
A spokesperson from Laser computer store in Nay Pyi Taw said: “We started selling prepaid cards on October 20 for K57,000 each. When the service became available, people immediately showed interest.
Ko Nay Linn Htike of Linn Computer shop in Pyinmana told The Myanmar Times that his shop started selling prepaid cards and handsets on October 24 for K56,000 each. So far he has sold 15 cards.
Handsets are between K55,000 to K250,000 extra, he said.
The opening of the CDMA 450MHz network in Nay Pyi Taw has also boosted the transport of phones to upper Myanmar, said Ma Lwin Mar Tun, the manager of AMT Mobile Mart in Mingalar Taung Nyunt township.
“Previously, we hardly moved and mobiles to Nay Pyi Taw but we’ve sent about 20 phones within a week since we learned the network was running there. We’ve also seen more orders from Taungoo and Mandalay. I’d say orders from upper Myanmar have jumped by 20 percent since the Nay Pyi Taw network was opened,” she said.
She said South Korean-made handsets and fixed phones, including Aiji AM 900, UbiQuam 400 and UbiQuam US 300 are hottest tickets and sell between K100,000 and K120,000 each.
“Handsets compromise about 70pc of these sales, with fixed phones about 30pc. And orders from Mandalay outweigh those from Taunggoo,” she added.
Phone cards purchased in either Yangon or Mandalay are now selling for between K1.75 million and K1.8 million in the city, even though the official cost is K1.5 million plus K50,000 in prepaid billing.
“A prepaid CDMA card costs between K50,000 and K60,000 and it doesn’t have a fixed number. I think it’s worth paying K1.8 million to buy a fixed number phone,” a Pyinmana native said.
MPT is continuing work to set up of transmission towers at the MPT office in Pyinmana, an MPT official said last week.
The official said applications for new CDMA SIM cards are being accepted but he said he did not know how many would be granted – if any – nor when they would be granted.
However, another official said that when a new batch of cards are released they will have 9-digit numbers starting with 09-77 and the installation and billing charges will remain the same. He added that MPT plans to operate a GSM network in the capital as well but was unable to offer a timeline for the unveiling of this network.
