DTAC applied for 3 million new phone numbers four weeks ago, and NTC commissioner Suchart Suchatvejapoom yesterday said the commission's board would consider the application next week.

DTAC chief commercial officer Thana Thienachariya said the delay in granting the new numbers might force DTAC to postpone plans for new promotions next month.

In the worst-case scenario, the company might have to begin cancelling services of subscribers who have not made any outgoing calls or received any incoming calls over the past nine months, in order to reuse their numbers.

About 300,000 of DTAC's 12 million subscribers have been inactive for the past nine months.

The country's second-largest cellular operator has already sold an additional 1.5 million numbers that were granted by the NTC last November.

After receiving the new numbers, DTAC will need extra time to feed them into its system, and for other operators to do the same, so that the numbers are recognised by other networks.

CEO Sigve Brekke said the NTC was capable of producing about a billion new phone numbers following its recent introduction of 10-digit mobile numbers. The commission should speed up the process of allocating additional numbers, in order to keep pace with telecom operators' brisk sales, he said.

DTAC has also informed TOT of its application for 3 million new numbers.

The two telecom operators were locked in dispute late last year, when TOT declined to connect 1.5 million new DTAC phone numbers with its existing fixed-line customers, saying DTAC had refused to pay its access charges. Eventually, TOT complied with a court ruling and made the connections, but the source of the problem remains unresolved. DTAC and True Move are refusing to pay TOT's access charges and are instead paying the interconnection charges introduced by the NTC.

The access charges are a cost against the cellular concessionaires of CAT Telecom for connecting to different networks via TOT's facilities.

The NTC's interconnection-charge regime requires all telecom operators to share voice and data revenues on a bilateral basis between the networks involved in the calls.

Meanwhile, DTAC will launch three types of value-added service cards for its prepaid mobile-phone customers: short-message service (SMS), multimedia message and General Packet Radio Service high-speed wireless access. The cards offer low-cost value-added services.

Sirivish Toomgum

The Nation