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Published on February 28, 2008

Suthep Srisuwan, TOT's senior executive vice president, said yesterday that the tie-up would save TOT between Bt17 billion to Bt20 billion as the company would not have to invest in a costly network to offer new services.

One of the six collaborative deals is for TOT to lease AIS's fibre-optic network in some areas to offer a broadband Internet service, with the aim of signing up 800,000 new users.

Currently TOT has around 400,000 broadband subscribers.

The other joint services with AIS include offering fixed-wireless network solutions to the commercial sector and low-income users in rural areas, a WiFi service, co-billing of their existing telecom services and a combined approach to prospective corporate customers.

The moves, which come after their signing a memorandum of understanding last month, is expected to prompt other mobile-phone service operators to negotiate similar deals with TOT or CAT Telecom.

Suthep said the ultimate goal of the partnership with AIS was to offer seamless fixed-and-mobile convergent services, including a 3G wireless broadband service.

TOT owns the AIS concession. Last year the country's largest mobile-phone service operator contributed revenue totalling Bt17.164 billion to TOT, followed by True Corp with Bt1.92 billion.

Last year TOT posted revenue of Bt52.590 billion, down from over Bt60 billion in 2006. Its profit stood at Bt5.901 billion, down 15.5 per cent from 2006.

For this year, TOT projects revenue growth of 7.6 per cent, due to its cost-saving programmes and revenue from the new services to be launched with AIS.

In a separate matter, the entire TOT board of directors resigned yesterday.

Usanee Mongkolporn

The Nation