Published on May 13, 2005

Regulator consulting operators; results to go to board next week

The national telecom regulator will create a panel to conduct a technical investigation into the cause of failed connections between mobile-phone networks.

Suranan Wongvithayakamjorn, secretary of the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC), said yesterday the NTC was gathering information from all mobile-phone operators for the panel.

The panel will study the results and submit them next week for consideration by the NTC board.

While this may sound good to mobile users, telecom executives who met with the NTC yesterday to work out a solution expressed disappointment with the results of the meeting.

They said the NTC failed to come up with any immediate measures to address the frustration caused by their customers’ failed connections.

Suranan argued it would be better to solve the problem step by step and that it was inappropriate to blame anyone too quickly for causing the problem.

The NTC began looking into the matter after complaints by Total Access Communication (DTAC) and TA Orange in recent weeks that their customers were experiencing constant failed connections when trying to contact clients of Advanced Info Service (AIS).

They accused AIS of blocking their customers’ calls to its networks. AIS executives responded by blaming the other companies’ own heavy call promotions, which encourage customers to make so many outgoing calls that their networks jam up.

AIS customers reportedly began this week to encounter similar difficulties themselves when calling out to other networks.

DTAC co-chief executive Vichai Bencharongkul said the success rate for connections to AIS dropped sharply in April, from an average of 50 per cent to 25 per cent and actually plunging to a low of 4 per cent at one point during the month.

TOT Corp executives told the NTC that their company was expanding its trunk – the point where cellular networks are connected to each other – to help ease the problem.

Mobile operators have been connecting their networks via both the TOT and the CAT Telecom trunks, as well as through separate direct links.

Wichian Mektrakarn, AIS executive vice president for operations, said separately yesterday that AIS customers too had experienced difficulties connecting to different networks but that AIS never blamed anyone.

A representative of Hutchison-CAT who attended the meeting also said that some Hutch customers have complained they sometimes could not connect to DTAC’s network.

Thana Thienachariya, DTAC’s chief commercial officer, told The Nation that the problem could be that the networks of DTAC and Hutch were connected via CAT’s trunk, which is very small.

Early this week, AIS proposed to TOT the creation of a new and bigger trunk to connect all cellular networks as a new channel to facilitate the calls of all mobile customers. However, the company yesterday refrained from floating the idea at the meeting.

Usanee Mongkolporn

The Nation

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