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Published on April 11, 2008

Deputy CEO Vitus Wong spoke publicly for the first time yesterday about the current row between his company and Thailand's largest mobile-phone operator. The issue, which arose on March 4, has led to court injunctions, threats, accusations and plans for new links between the networks.

Wong said Hutch was likely to suffer marketing problems in the future if the problem was not solved.

Investigating the case is the Consumer Protection Institute of the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC). It has already advised Hutch to work out a plan to compensate its affected customers and present it for the institute's scrutiny.

Wong said Hutch had worked closely with the relevant parties, including CAT Telecom and the NTC, to try to solve the problem.

"It [the problem] is unprecedented in our operations since day one," said Wong, referring to difficulties faced by its customers in calling the AIS network.

Hutch has been marketing a cellular service covering 25 provinces under a contract from CAT Telecom. The company is a 40:60 joint venture between CAT and Hong Kong telecom giant Hutchison Telecom. Wong said Hutch Telecom's largest shareholder, Hutchison Whampoa, was fully aware of the problems the operation was facing.

Hutch has accused AIS of blocking its customers' calls, pointing to a fall in the call-completion rate to the AIS network over some weeks. AIS denies the charge and says Hutch's heavy call promotions have created call jams in TOT's network, which is used to connect calls from Hutch to AIS.

Hutch has about 1 million customers, while AIS has more than 24 million, Total Access Communication (DTAC) 18 million and True Move 12 million. Hutch had a market share of only 1.85 per cent at the end of last year after the net addition of 249,000 customers.

Up to now, Hutch has received more than 10,000 complaints from customers about difficulties in calling AIS subscribers.

Hutch was recently granted an injunction by the Civil Court preventing AIS from blocking its customers' calls. Shortly after that, Hutch said there was an improvement in the call-completion rate, but Wong pointed out it was hard to single out any specific reason for the improvement.

Wong denied that Hutch had a cost advantage that allowed it to offer heavy call promotions, in that it had not been paying interconnection fees. He said Hutch instead bore the cost of access charges paid to TOT.

Besides sharing revenue with CAT, Hutch paid access charges of about Bt1 billion to TOT last year. The access charge is levied by TOT against all private cellular operators that are CAT Telecom concessionaires for connecting to different networks via TOT's facilities.

The access charges are at the heart of another long-standing telecom industry dispute. Some CAT concessionaires, including DTAC and True Move, have stopped paying the access charges and have instead paid interconnection fees, which were created by the regulations of the NTC.

The NTC wants the caller's network to pay interconnection fees to the receiver's network and says the level of the fees should be subject to bilateral agreements between the operators. AIS, DTAC and True Move pay bilaterally agreed interconnection fees to each other at a rate of Bt1 per minute.

CAT Telecom, speaking for itself and Hutch, recently proposed an interconnection rate of 21 satang a minute to DTAC, but DTAC turned it down. Since then, DTAC has asked the NTC to fix an interim interconnection rate between it and Hutch.

Sirivish Toomgum

The Nation