Sudharma Yoonaidharma, a member of the National Telecommunications Commission, wants to slash all telecom licence fees in half to promote growth and competition in the industry.

"The NCT should not earn a lot of money from licence fees but rather from [phone] number fees and frequency licence fees," Sudharma said yesterday.

He also plans to propose to the NTC to reduce the contribution of telecoms to the Universal Service Obligation (USO) fund to 2 per cent from the present 4 per cent.

All NTC licensees are required either to pay into the USO fund or invest in providing services to remote areas. The NTC will use the USO fund to contract companies to build telecom infrastructure in unserved areas. Operators also have to pay the NTC a licence fee ranging from a few thousand baht to a maximum 3 per cent of their revenues.

Since its inception three years ago, the NTC has awarded more than 80 Internet service licences. It has recently cut the processing time for Internet licence applications to three days from a month.

"We've used the licences as a tool to free up the Internet market. This will speed up the development of new services related to the Internet business," Sudharma told a seminar on Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and business opportunities, held by the weekly Thai language newspaper Telecom Journal.

Several licensed Internet service providers (ISPs) have already launched VoiP-based calling services.

Sudharma said that now licensed ISPs could request phone numbers from the NTC to offer VoiP-based calling between telephones.

Earlier licensees could provide only VoIP calls between PCs and from a PC to a telephone anywhere in the world.

The NTC has set aside 10 million phone numbers for the telephone-to-telephone VoIP service.

A representative of CAT Telecom said its VoIP calling service was picking up momentum, thanks to low minimum rates of Bt1 to Bt2 per minute.

According to CAT, overseas VoIP calls accounted for 24.2 per cent of total overseas calls of 313 billion minutes last year. In 2005 VoiP calls made up 19.4 per cent of overseas calls of 272 billion minutes.

Jayn Jootha, head of VoIP strategic management for True Corp, said its VoIP calling service had grown in line with the nationwide increase in broadband Internet subscribers, whose numbers are expected to reach one million this year from 800,000 last year.

True is interested in requesting phone numbers from the NTC to offer VoiP calling between telephones, he added.

Usanee Mongkolporn

 The Nation