The Information and Communica-tions Technology Ministry will discuss with Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont guidelines to promote a level playing field in the telecom sector this week.

ICT minister Sitthichai Pookaiyaudom said yesterday that the issues to be discussed with the premier include access and interconnection charges, revenue sharing of private telecom operators, and the telecom excise tax.

Last Friday, Sitthichai proposed to the Finance Ministry

to terminate the previous Cabinet's resolution introduced in February 2003 that permitted private telecom operators to pay a part of their concession fees as excise tax.

This move led to a decline in the concession revenues of TOT and CAT Telecom, which owned the private telecom concessions.

Sitthichai said that the excise tax cost TOT and CAT Bt23.903 billion and Bt15.249 billion, respectively, from 2003 to 2005.

TOT owns the concessions of the largest cellular operator Advanced Info Service (AIS), which was founded by the Shinawatra family, True Corp and TT&T, while CAT owns the

cellular concessions of Total Access Communication (DTAC), Digital Phone (DPC), and True Move.

Under the telecom excise tax, the private cellular concessionaires have directly paid 10 per cent out of their concession fees to the government before sharing the remainder with TOT or CAT.

The fixed telephone operators have paid 2 per cent out of the concession fee to the government before giving the remainder to TOT or CAT.

"This is unfair as the tax passes on the private telecom operators' burden to the state telecom agencies," Sittichai said.

He added that the guidelines are expected to be concluded next month.

Besides the telecom excise tax, he will discuss with the prime minister the access charge dispute between the state and private telecom operators.

The access charge is the cost all CAT cellular concessionaires have paid TOT for connecting different networks via TOT's facilities, while the interconnection charge of the National Telecommuni-cations Commission (NTC) has mandated all telecom operators to share voice and data revenue proportionately between the networks involved in the calls.

DTAC has asked TOT to convert the access charge into the interconnection charge, so that it will pay only the latter charge.

But the state agency has yet to grant the request out of concern for losing the access charge revenue.