AIS president Wichian Mektrakarn yesterday said TOT, owner of his company's concession, had yet to reply to the largest cellular operator about whether its compliance with the interconnection charge introduced by the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) last year would be a breach of its concession contract.

"Therefore, we may not be able to collect interconnection-charge revenues from the other telecom operators, and that means there'll be no interconnection revenues booked in our financial result for the first quarter," he added.

AIS and other major cellular operators Total Access Communication (DTAC) and True Move started recording the call traffic between them in February after signing bilateral interconnection-charge agreements late last year, the same time AIS asked TOT about the matter. Their interconnection bills will be due at the end of next month.

Analysts estimate that AIS is expected to be the net gainer of interconnection-charge revenues of Bt3.5 billion a year, given that it is the biggest incoming-call receiver.

AIS's concession states that its network interconnection with the others must be done through TOT, although in practice the state agency has permitted all telecom operators to connect directly with one another besides via TOT.

The interconnection-charge regulations enable all telecom operators to connect directly with one another and share voice and data revenues from the calls between their networks on a bilateral and fair basis.

The telecom operator receiving the biggest incoming call traffic and having the least outgoing traffic will be the one to gain the highest interconnection revenues.

AIS has more than 20 million subscribers, DTAC more than 12 million and True Move about 7 million.

After paying the access charge to TOT for years, DTAC last November 17 started paying it at the lower interconnection-charge rate as part of its attempt to exit its access-charge agreement with TOT.

The access charge is the cost that all three private cellular concessionaires of CAT Telecom - DTAC, True Move, and Digital Phone - have paid to TOT for connecting different networks via TOT's facilities.

TOT has earned annual access-charge revenues of Bt14 billion from the three operators.

TOT and CAT have a joint plan to ask the Central Administrative Court to rule on whether they must comply with the access charge or the interconnection charge. However, they have yet to make any move.

Usanee Mongkolporn

The Nation