Summary

  • Laos’s August 1998 satellite gateway was authorized for a project connecting the Lao news agency KPL, but GlobeNet also offered wireless service in Vientiane.
  • ISP licences in January 1999, PlaNet’s small February dial-up start and LaoTel’s August commercial service marked distinct steps, not one national “arrival” date.
  • Contemporary and later reports count different kinds of users and use different provider names, so their figures should not be combined.

For years, “the first Internet connection” has sounded like a date waiting to be pinned down. Laos’s record resists that neat answer. A permanent international gateway, permission to operate an ISP, the start of dial-up service and the ability to obtain a working telephone line were separate thresholds. They arrived on different schedules.

An International Telecommunication Union (ITU) case study says GlobeNet established Laos’s first permanent Internet connection in August 1998. A satellite link routed through the Philippines connected Vientiane to the global network. The Ministry of Information and Culture had authorized it as part of a project to connect Khaosan Pathet Lao (KPL), the state news agency. But the same account says GlobeNet was already providing wireless broadband to nearly 50 customers in Vientiane. The project purpose explains the permission; it does not make the link an exclusive KPL circuit.

The next step was institutional. In January 1999, the Lao National Internet Committee awarded ISP licences to GlobeNet and PlaNet Computers. PlaNet began service the following month, yet the ITU says only a few dial-up customers could connect because telephone lines were scarce. Permission to sell access did not create a local line for every prospective subscriber.

LaoTel followed a different route. The national telecommunications operator had received a licence from the Ministry of Communications, Transport, Posts and Construction in 1997, but the ITU case study dates its commercial Internet launch to August 1999. It used a 64-kilobit-per-second connection to SingNet in Singapore. A contemporaneous Lao national report presented at an ITU telecommunications meeting describes that link as ready to serve roughly 1,000 subscribers and ten corporate nodes “within this year”; a Vientiane Times report reposted on Usenet says Lao Internet was publicly unveiled on 3 August.

The accounts distinguish readiness, public launch and commercial operation less cleanly than the dates imply.

The numbers also resist a single market story. The 1999 national report calls the KPL–Globecom system operational in 1998 and reports more than 300 subscribers. A later ITU case study names GlobeNet and separately reports nearly 50 wireless customers. The sources do not establish that these totals describe the same product or counting method. PlaNet’s own present-day history says the company was founded in 1998 and began operating as an ISP in 2001, while the ITU describes a small 1999 dial-up launch. Different definitions of “ISP service” may explain the mismatch, but the available record does not settle it.

So what arrived first? A gateway reached the global Internet in 1998; licensing and commercial access broadened in 1999, unevenly and through different operators. Read through Lu Heng’s later Note 64, the useful distinction is between a common route across borders, local authority to operate, and actual adoption by customers. That note supplies an analytical lens, not evidence about Lao policy. The history is less a launch moment than a chain of permissions, international links, provider decisions and scarce local lines.

Sources: ITU, Lao PDR Internet Case Study; ITU, 1999 national report for Lao PDR; Vientiane Times report, 18 August 1999, reposted to Usenet; UNESCAP, Greater Mekong Subregion ICT study; PLANET company history.