Internet (& Email) in Myanmar

[Maung Maung]

This has been written for people interested in living Yangon, not for tourists.

Two internet service providers, the govt. and the govt! One will tell you that they are a private company. Nudge, nudge, wink wink!

It is very expensive and the service is rubbish. It is painfully slow.

It will cost you US$1000 just to get hooked up and you'll have to pay another US$70 a month on top of that. There are download limits, around 400Mb per month. Every Mb over that will cost you US0.20 per Mb.

If you choose a serviced apartment you can get it cheaper (shared connection effectively) at around US$35 per month with a US$60 annual fee.

Almost all online "webmail" services like Yahoo and Hotmail are banned. They want all emails going through their servers, you can imagine why!

Many websites are also banned, especially those related to anti-govt. groups. Pretty much all the porn sites are banned as well.

You can't use programs like Yahoo Messenger etc as they block the ports, there's quite a lot of software that updates from the internet that doesn't work. Anti-virus seems to update fine.

If you try and use your Visa or Mastercard online you're likely to see the message "you are in an embargoed country, we are unable to process your request", it's all to do with the US sanctions. You can't even update/download Sun's Java for this reason.

Online gaming and conferencing are impossible due to the service being so slow.

Everything is accessed through a proxy server and through a specific port.