A new committee will meet with TrueMove, Total Access Communication (DTAC) and Advanced Info Service (AIS) on Monday to discuss the termination plans for mobilephoneservice concessions.
The joint committee was set up by the Finance and Information and Communications Technology Ministries to draw up a concessiontermination plan. It met with the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) yesterday to discuss the plan, known as K2.
NTC commissioner Natee Sukonrat said he recommended to the committee that it determine if the termination would affect the country's interest.
He cited a spectrum auction in Germany in which the winning price for the 900 MHz and 800 MHz spectra were 4.6 times higher than the auction price of the 2.1GHz spectrum. If the NTC has to give the mobilephone con¬cession holders the licences to use their existing 800 MHz and 900 MHz spectra for 15 years and without spectrum bidding, this could affect the country's interest.
Under the K2 concept proposed by the finance ministry, the mobilephone service concessions would be terminated and the NTC would issue to the concession holders 15 year licences to use their existing spectra. They might be asked to pay an undetermined upfront fee on a oneoff basis to their concession owners: TOT or CAT Telecom.
The ministry also proposed that the NTC set their licence fee at 12.5 per cent of their annual revenue and increase the fee of the 3G2.1GHz licences to 12.5 per cent from 6 per cent of the licence holders' revenue. This will put the licences with existing spectra and the 3G spectra under the same conditions.
The committee, chaired by ICT Minister Chuti Krairiksh, needs collaboration from all parties to achieve the K2 plan. It is scheduled to finish the model within the next few weeks.