The board of the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) yesterday made a resolution to slap a fine of Bt166,667 per day, or about Bt5 million per month, on each of five telecom operators for failing to meet the August 31 deadline jointly to get the mobile number portability (MNP) system off the ground.
The NTC sent a letter to inform the telecom operators yesterday and is expected to start levying the fines on September 10 Friday. The money collected from the fines will be transferred to the state coffers, said NTC deputy sec¬retary general Prasert Apipunya.
He said fines would double next month if the telecom operators by that time have still failed to submit to the NTC a clear date when they will launch MNP, which will enable mobilephone users to keep using their existing phone numbers if they switch to a different network.
Premon Pinsakul, chairman of Clearinghouse Co, said the opera¬tors would discuss how to react to the fine.
The five operators - Advanced Info Service, Total Access Communication, TrueMove, CAT Telecom and TOT - recently made a joint announcement that the MNP should be up and ready by December. They are conducting a joint test of the system this month with Clearinghouse Co, which they jointly founded to facilitate the porting.
They reasoned that they could not meet the NTC deadline as they needed time to test the system to ensure its smooth operation.
The NTC worked out the fine amount from the average revenue per user of each cellular operator of Bt250 per month times the 100,000 portings per month it expects once the MNP system is up and running. Then it divided that amount by five, the number of operators, to come up with the daily amount.