NTC finishes portability regulations

National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) secretary-general Suranan Wongvithayakamjorn yesterday said the board also asked the Legal Department to examine the draft before resubmitting it for final approval.

The examination process should be completed this month, which suggests the regulations could also be published in the Royal Gazette this month.

The regulations will allow mobile-service subscribers to use their existing numbers when switching to a new network. This will encourage cellular operators to provide better service, in order to maintain their subscriber base.

Suranan said once the NTC published the regulations in the Royal Gazette, it would give cellular operators three months to fine-tune their network systems to support the porting and settlement of the porting fee.

Once they finish doing this, the regulations will take effect. But this could be delayed if the operators fail to complete the fine-tuning on time.

The NTC will later determine the fee a subscriber must pay to the new network for porting the old number.

The regulations stipulate the operators must complete porting of customers' phone numbers to their desired networks within three days after receiving a request.

The porting fee is one of the unsettled issues in the regulations. The original version of the draft set the fee at Bt300, but that was opposed by consumers during public hearings as too high. They said the fee should be waived.

Later, the NTC decided to remove mention of the fee from the draft, enabling it to finish the regulations more easily.

More than 50 million mobile-phone SIM cards are in use in Thailand.