TOT chairman Montree Supaporn said yesterday it had arrived at the plan after meeting on Wednesday with him and his counterparts at CAT Telecom and Thailand Post.

The ministry has wanted to merge the boards of the three state agencies so that they worked more in sync. It also wants to make TOT the national network provider for third-generation broadband-cellular and -Internet services.

Montree said the ministry would also set up another body to act as a clearing-house for the interconnection payments of all telecoms.

TOT will ask the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) to postpone its plan to enforce the interconnection charge rates of all operators, pending the establishment of ICT Thailand and settlement of the access-charge dispute between TOT and private cellular firms with CAT Telecom concessions.

The NTC has already imposed the interconnection charge regime, which allows all operators to connect directly with one another and share voice revenues from calls between their networks on a fair basis.

However, all operators have yet to finalise the interconnection rates they will charge each other for the NTC to enforce. Industry sources believe they are unlikely to reach a final rate agreement by the NTC's deadline of next Wednesday.

If they do not, the NTC will take 90 days to set interim interconnection rates for them.

The cellular firms have agreed to settle interconnection payments among themselves instead of depending on a third party.

An industry source said Total Access Communication (DTAC) and True Move had finalised their interconnection rates between them, but DTACchief executive officer Sigve Brekke denies that.

All of CAT Telecom's cellular concession holders want to stop paying the access charge to TOT as compensation for connecting calls across networks and instead switch to the interconnection charge regime at the expense of TOT.

The ICT Ministry recently set up a panel to resolve the access-charge issue.

Usanee Mongkolporn

The Nation