True Move may move clients to new firm
True Corp Plc plans to transfer customers from its True Move mobile-phone service unit to its subsidiary Samutprakan Media Corp Co Ltd if the latter wins a cellular licence from the national telecom regulator.
This is one option the company has for freeing True Move from costly state concession contracts, according to Supachai Chearavanont, True Corp's chief executive. New companies will likely be exempt from concession contracts, long a thorn in the side of mobile phone service providers. True Move, which has more than five million subscribers, operates on a concession from CAT Telecom Plc and shares 20 per cent of its revenue with CAT. It also pays access charges to TOT Plc for connecting to other networks via TOT's network. True Move wants to stop paying the access charge and pay only the interconnection charge under the National Telecommunications Commission's new regime. The interconnection regulations require all telecoms to share voice and data revenues from calls between two networks. While True Corp has operated under TOT Plc's concession contract, both compete for phone and Internet service customers. Samutprakan Media recently asked the NTC to grant it a cellular licence to operate either GSM cellular service or broadband wireless cellular technology (3G), depending on the NTC's decision to grant it one or the other. But the NTC said the company's specifications did not correspond with the type of licence it had requested. The NTC said that the company wanted a Type-3 licence but did not have its own mobile-phone network. Samutprakan said it would lease a network from another cellular operator and use that operator's spectrum. But the NTC's Type-3 licence is only for an operator with a network. The NTC is also looking into whether its regulations allow the leasing of an allocated cellular spectrum. Capitalised with Bt1 million, Samutprakan Media is wholly owned by Bangkok Inter Teletech Plc, which in turn is 82.86-per-cent owned by True. A source at True said that Samutprakan Media planned to build its own cellular network as well as lease some facilities and the cellular frequencies from True Move. Yesterday True filed with the Stock Exchange of Thailand its plan to establish a new wholly owned subsidiary, N&T Communications, for its "telecom business expansion". N&T has Bt1 million in registered capital.
Usanee Mongkolporn The Nation
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