Vietnam is making a tilt at the front ranks of telecom with an ambitious 5G timetable.
Its biggest operators are running 5G field trials and aim to have commercial services running next year.
If achieved, that would put them close behind the region's leaders, Korea and China.
The biggest local operator, Viettel, which carried out Vietnam's first 5G end-to-end 5G connection in May, has deployed 70 trial base stations in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.
Rivals Mobifone and Vinafone are also in the 5G hunt with trials this year.
The driver for all of this is the government's economic ambitions.
"We want to be at the forefront of the fourth Industrial Revolution and develop the ICT sector," Information and Communications Minister Nguyen Manh Hung told Vietnam News.
Industrial 5G was a priority, Nguyen said. "Viettel and other network providers must experiment to cover 5G in all hi-tech zones, national innovation centres and smart factories by 2020," he said.
But this timetable is going to be a stretch, even for Viettel, the $11 billion heavyweight.
For one thing, the country advanced to 4G as recently as 2016. Operators elsewhere in the world have had eight or more years to achieve an economic return. Vietnam carriers will have barely half that.
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