One telecom executive said the private operators made the request yesterday during a meeting with NTC secretary-general Suranan Wongvithayakamjorn.

Suranan said it was the first "lunch meeting" between telecom executives and his NTC. The purpose was for the regulator to learn about operators' business problems before embarking on industry reform.

While he said the meeting did not touch deeply on any one topic, the telecom executive said Suranan promised to speak with the Finance Ministry about whether it was possible to make concession conversion a reality.

The ministry controls both state telecom agencies: TOT Plc and CAT Telecom Plc.

The private telecom operators want to shift fully away from the old regime of the state telecom agencies to NTC regulations. They do not want to share concession revenues with the state agencies, which they consider to be their business rivals.

Some of CAT's private telecom concessionaires intend to stop paying TOT the access charge, which is the cost of connecting different networks via TOT's facilities.

They want to pay only the interconnection charge to each other under any new NTC regime.

But the licensing body has insisted it would not intervene in the access-charge case between TOT and CAT's private concessionaires, because the access-charge deal was made before the NTC's establishment.

The NTC is implementing interconnection-charge regulations that will require all telecom operators to share voice and data revenues between the two networks involved in a call.

"Some of CAT's private telecom operators want the NTC to make it clear what they must do with the access charge once it completely implements the interconnection charge," said the telecom executive.

A TOT representative told the meeting that the company would face public criticism if it lost the access-charge revenue.

In a related matter, Total Access Communication (DTAC) and True Move informed Suranan during the meeting that they had cleared up their dispute that arose after DTAC blocked all short messages (SMSs) sent from True Move's network to DTAC's last Wednesday to Thursday evening.

The blocking was in retaliation for TA Orange's sending of SMSs to DTAC customers last Wednesday inviting them to pick up that company's SIM cards, in order to gain the exclusive right to vote in the reality show "Academy Fantasia 3", which is aired on UBC True.

DTAC lifted the block last Thursday evening once True Move informed it that the SMSs had been stopped.

Usanee Mongkolporn

The Nation