As a Saigonese — as what Vietnamese from Ho Chi Minh City are called, I cannot help but to compare the ICT developments between Da Nang — Vietnam’s fourth biggest city, and my home town, Ho Chi Minh City — the biggest city in terms of economic contribution.
Well, why does a more advanced city like Ho Chi Minh City decided not to cover its territory with free Wi-Fi, like Da Nang City? What could be causing this discrepancy, is it size, budget, or vision?
At 2,095 square kilometres, Ho Chi Minh City is almost twice the size of Da Nang City (1,256 square kilometres). Considering this difference, it makes sense that Ho Chi Minh City faces more difficulty to cover the entire city with free Wi-Fi.
However, this assumption is challenged by the public free Wi-Fi project in Thailand.
Thailand has launched over 120,000 public free Wi-Fi hotspots across the nation since 2011, and will introduce an addition of 150,000 hotspot locations by next year.
So, the size differences between Ho Chi Minh and Da Nang are not the objection to the feasibility of city wide free Wi-Fi coverage.
If size does not matter, what is it?
Da Nang City’s Department of Information and Communications received US$2 million to spend on the citywide free Wi-Fi scheme. However, at the same time, in 2012, the People’s Committee of Ho Chi Minh City allocated VND 8,000 billion (US$384 million) to invest in building Saigon Hi-Tech Park phase 2. Hence, it can be seen that Ho Chi Minh City has enough budget for the development of ICT projects such as the public free Wi-Fi.
Apparently, budget is not the concern for the government. But, the way it has been allocated in respective cities clearly show the differences in focus and strategy of the leaders from the two cities.
Da Nang City government focuses more on fostering tourism and promoting citizen services. Covering the whole city with free Wi-Fi is a great initiative to start with. Besides focusing on giving better experience for tourism via high speed Internet, the city government also aims to leverage ICT to improve the government’s performance and efficiency. These can be seen from the recent efforts to launch an e-assessment programme to evaluate the performance of civil servants, as well as digitising the city map for smarter use by the officials and residents.
Ho Chi Minh City, on the other hand, targets itself to become the ICT hub of Vietnam and ASEAN. With this goal, Ho Chi Minh City government concentrates more on drawing foreign investment for ICT industry, such as the Saigon Hi-Tech Park project. This park was set to be a facility for high-technology enterprises with the aim of promoting Ho Chi Minh City as a hi-tech investor friendly destination. High-tech investors are given preferential treatments there with special land leases and taxation scheme, as well as the support for customs services.
The number of public free hotspots alone cannot be used to benchmark the ICT growth of both cities, but the budget allocations, project focuses, and proactive plans can be used as the important indicators showing how government is performing and whether it is heading towards achieving its goals.
I might not be able to access free public Wi-Fi when I visit my home in Ho Chi Minh City next time, but I see growing potential of more ICT developments there. I would like to hear your thoughts on this. What is the impact of free Wi-Fi to the city, its citizens, and travellers? Do you think it is important for city governments to provide with free public Wi-Fi?
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Hung Huynh
Quelle/Source: futureGov, 12.06.2013
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