The institute made the suggestion in a paper titled "The Telecom Industry's Crisis and the Way Out", to be presented to a seminar today. The paper was written by Sumeth Vongpanitlerd, a former director of telecom research at TDRI, and TDRI senior specialist Narong Pomlaktong.

The institute said the Finance Ministry, which owns TOT, should cut the access charge to a certain level.

The reduction could be made on the condition that CAT Telecom, which owns DTAC's concession, return the spectrum exceeded by DTAC to the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) for development of activities that benefited the public.

The access charge is what all CAT's private cellular concessionaires - DTAC, True Move and Digital Phone - have paid TOT to connect to different networks through TOT's facilities.

DTAC and True Move intend to pay only the NTC interconnection charge, which requires all telecom operators to share voice and data revenues between the two networks involved in the calls, instead of paying both access and interconnection charges. TOT has opposed this plan for fear of losing Bt14 billion a year in access-charge revenues.

The TDRI said the government was not expected to lose huge revenues from the access-charge cut, because DTAC and True Move would gain from it. They could then share a greater proportion of the concession fee with CAT and accordingly pay more corporate tax to the state.

TOT recently asked the Council of State to rule on which charge the company had to comply with: the access charge or the interconnection charge.

Besides the access charge, the industry is fraught with several other problems, including price distortion in fixed-line services, a lack of basic telecom infrastructure and a lack of unity in reforming the industry.

For the fixed-line business, the TDRI suggested that the long-distance call rate should be a certain uniform rate per minute, unlike the current various rates that depend on distance called. This would enable fixed-line telephone operators to compete with cellular firms.

The TDRI also suggested that the new constitution mandate a merger between the NTC and the National Broadcasting Commission, in order to prevent overlapping responsibilities and be in line with the current trend in converging telecommunications and broadcasting technologies.

Telecom Reporters

The Nation