How do Lao families and local networks get (re)connected four decades since an unprecedented disruption following the 1975 socialist revolution? And how have such forms of connection developed through the three decades following the implementation of the New Economic Mechanism (NEM or "Jintanakan May")? As a country with the lowest population in mainland Southeast Asia and with the lowest population density among the ASEAN countries, Laos has the highest proportion of nationals living outside their homeland. The figure is the consequences of political upheaval and socio-economic transformation that saw approximately one tenth of the country's population immigrating through Thailand to third countries over the first decades under socialist rule. The shift to NEM in 1986 is the key basis of the more recent migration trend that leads to a current number of more than five per cent Lao migrant workers in Thailand and beyond. On the other hand, the political implication of NEM has opened up possibilities for many of the post-1975 immigrants to revisit their homeland over the past two decades. Such key demographic characteristics of Lao PDR have so far been recognised in socio-economic terms, especially with reference to remittances which account for a quarter of the country's foreign exchange reserve during 2010's. This paper explores how such physical and socio-economic mobilities are entangled in mobile communication, particularly as part of a co-constituive process whereby persons in contemporary Lao society situate themselves in local, regional and transnational networks. 

Mobile communication has been key to the inclusion of private phone and internet communication in Laos since NEM incorporated Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in the country's telecommunication development. However, individual access to mobile communication has still largely been hampered by high import tax and usage charge. In addition to looking at mobile technologies as “environments of affordances” (Madianou and Miller 2012) in terms of consumption and appropriation, I propose a comparative discussion on how Lao diasporas, migrant workers, their families and local networks make mobile communication viable despite infrastructural and economic constraints; how local configurations of mobile technologies are part of an ongoing process of production through which persons get locally and transnationally connected.