New TOT chairman Montree Supaporn said yesterday his top priorities were to end the deadlock over access fees and ensure transparency by eliminating corruption.

Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont had asked him to oversee the state agency, citing national security, Montree said during an unofficial meeting of the TOT board.

The retired general was involved in an Army project, later abandoned, to develop a communications satellite.

The Finance Ministry, sole owner of TOT and CAT Telecom, recently appointed new boards.

Montree said resolving the access and interconnection fees mess were top items on the TOT board's agenda.

The access charge is what operators of cellular services under a CAT concession must pay TOT for using its facilities to connect to other networks.

But the CAT concession holders want to escape their access-charge obligation and pay only the interconnection charge required by the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC), in which all telecom operators share voice revenues for calls carried over their networks.

"If they stop paying us the access charge, TOT will suffer a loss. So I'll seek details about what the best solution would be," said Montree, adding that TOT would comply with NTC regulations but still had to honour its existing concessions with the private telecoms.

He said he would set up a panel to examine whether TOT's major concessions have any terms or conditions contradicting NTC rules and if so, whether they could be brought into compliance.

The board will consider whether it will proceed with the state agency's ongoing selection process for president by using the existing short-list of candidates or restarting the process.

The board will also evaluate outsourcing its auditing operations, in order to ensure TOT's transparency.

"Some big-budget projects may be revised along the lines of the government's sufficiency economy policy," Montree said.

He said some necessary projects, such as TOT's roll-out of a third-generation (3G) broadband cellular network, should be continued.

The state agency plans to lease bandwidth on the 3G network to private telecom firms as a new source of revenue.

Usanee Mongkolporn

The Nation