To step up the country to become a new digital city, the government of Laos is planning to invest US$35 millions of budget to digitise the country by developing ICT infrastructure to allow Laos people to get access to any electronic government services by next year.
The plan also includes the development of wireless technology in Vientiane city to turn the traditional city to become the first WiMax town in Asian countries to provide high speed Internet access to support the upcoming Seagame 2009.
Under the egovernment project, Somlouay Kittignavong, acting director general of National Authority for Science and Technology said that there were five pillars for the development. Those include the development of infrastructure, human resource, legal framework, ICT application and standardization.
While infrastructure pillar involves laying down national high speed network to provide eservices, human resource pillar is to accelerate the production of ICT human resources in the country to support ICT growth of the country.
He said to move ICT industry forwards, the government would have to develop electronic related legislations to cope up with the upcoming information technology era such as egovernment law, cyber crime and ecommerce law, for example.
In part of ICT applications, he said the government planned to develop national portal site to link all government office web sites to provide a single point of contact to provide eservices to the public such as eregistration, emap, elearning, eapplication and erevenue.
When ICT is put in place, standardization is also important. The plan is to develop standard Laos Unicode to build up provide Laos language platform to support new information technology development.
“We also plan to come out localise Microsoft Office and Microsoft Vista for Laos version early next year,” he said.
In addition, the government has a plan to turn the city of Vientiane into wireless city by planning to set up 10 WiMax based stations in Vientiane and 16 based station in capital cities nationwide, said Phonpasit Phissamay, acting director general of Loa’s Information Technology Research Institute (ITRI).
He said that the government planned to begin a pilot test of WiMax technology in September this year before official launch to the public early next year.
WiMAX stands for the Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, which is a wireless digital communications system, and provide fibre optic services to end users at speed 11 Mbps.
Next, Phonpasit said that the government would study mobile WiMax technology, which allowed mobile phone users to enjoy using high speed wireless Internet on their mobile device while on the go.
Currently, Laos has around 50,000 Internet users from totally population 5.6 million people.
By December 2007, the total number of Internet users in China reached 210 million (only 5 million less than the United States);
more than 10 Millions internet users in vietnam
Internet users in thailand in 2007 : 8,465,800
it is a good news that the internet users are increasing rapidly in Laos 6,000 internet users in Laos in 2000 according to the report of World Gazetteer and the users reached 25,000 in 2006, the growth of internet usage in Laos are still slow compared to the neighboring
