The Greater Mekong Sub-region (GMS) member countries will invest 66.21 million US dollars to build an Information Superhighway in the area in a bid to boost economic and trade exchanges and cultural communications.

The construction of the Information Superhighway proposed last year will commence soon, announced Han Yihu, an official with China Telecom, at a Sunday forum on business participation in GMS cooperation in Kunming, capital of southwest China's Yunnan Province.

According to the plan, in the first phase of the program between 2005 and 2008, the six GMS countries, namely Cambodia, China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam, will build up a point-to-point optical transmission system among themselves to lay a sound infrastructure foundation for future smooth telecommunication connections in the region.

When the point-to-point transmission system reaches a certain penetration rate, the GMS nations will put in place the ring networks during the 2009-2010 period, which will support greater transmission capacity and remove telecommunication barriers in the region, said Han.

The third phase will witness the launch of a wide range of international communication services including e-commerce, e-government, e-education, e-health, based on the network platform built in the previous phases.

The GMS Information Superhighway will provide a broadband platform connecting the six GMS countries where basic services including voice, data and internet access services can be provided, Han said.

The telecom industry in the GMS region is backward in general, especially in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam, which are still at the early stage of telecom development. Government statistics show that in 2003 the percentage of phone subscribers is only 0.24, 0.75, 0.56 and 3.19 respectively in the four countries mentioned above.

In November last year, the six GMS nations signed an agreement on building the Information Superhighway together. China Telecom organized the first meeting on the project implementation in January of 2005 and made the preliminary plan.

Source: Xinhua