The board of the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) recently approved the draft regulations promoting the use of locally-made telecom network equipment and local application development.
As part of the draft, the holders of type-2- licences and type-3 licences can deduct their licence fees with the cost of local equipment in their networks installed to provide the equal telecom service access to the remote area under the Universal Service Obligation (USO).
They can use the full cost of the local equipment to deduct the annual licence fee for maximum five years but not exceeding the full licence fee amount they have to pay during the five-year period on the condition that the value of their local equipment is less than 40 per cent of total value of the network under USO.
They can deduct two times of the local equipment value from the licence fee for five years but not exceeding the total fee during the period on the condition that the value of their local equipment is at least 40 per cent of the network value.
The network investment outside USO project is also subject to the deduction.
They can use 50 per cent value of the local equipment cost to deduct the licence fee for five years but not exceeding 30 per cent of the fee they have to pay during the period on the condition that the value of the local equipment is at least 20 per cent of the total network value.
The categories of the local equipment cost they can use to deduct fee have to be the ones that gain Board of Investment support and 70 per cent of R&D team staff of such equipment must be Thais.
The holders of the type-2 licence either have or do not have their own networks but their services are intended for specific customer groups, while the holders of the type-3 licence have their own networks and their competition can impact the public in a wide scale.
The NTC will also set up the Application Test Centre to promote the local application development.