Currently the domestic information and communication technologiesmarket accounts for 1.5 percent of GDP, but this figure has been targeted to grow to nine percent or 5.5 billion dollars in 2010.

The projection is in line with the International Telecommunication Union's 2002 country study, which says Vietnam has the fastest growing telecoms market in Southeast Asia.

Jordan Ryan, the resident representative for the United Nations Development Programme in Vietnam, said the communist nation had the potential to become a regional ICT tiger.

But he stressed the government must ensure the potential ICT growth must be harnessed for social and economic development.

"Vietnam, at all costs, must avoid becoming a two-speed country where a handful of provinces account for the general progress while others lag behind," he said.

ICT has generated an unprecedented spread of wealth and knowledge, but it has also created a new digital divide that has "exacerbated perhaps the most pernicious aspect of modern global deprivation: information poverty," Ryan said.

His comments were made in a statement accompanying a two-day seminar focusing on Vietnam's ICT development.

The annual telecoms and Internet growth rate in the country between 1995 and 2002 was 32.5 percent, according to the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications.

The number of fixed line telephone subscribers as of August reached nearly 6.4 million -- or eight phones per 100 people -- while the number of mobile subscribers is about 1.9 million, with the rate of 2.47 phones per 100 people.

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