Bid to extend rights on shaky ground

The National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC) will reject National Telecom’s (NT) plan to ask the regulator to extend its use of three spectrum bands following their expiry in September 2025.
The NBTC has to comply with the NBTC Act which defines all the spectrum bands as national resources and the unused spectrum bands have to be reallocated via an auction process, according to Somphop Purivigraipong, the NBTC commissioner responsible for the telecom business sector.
NT’s 850MHz, 2100MHz and 2300MHz are among the bands the NBTC plans to auction by either the second quarter of 2025 or ahead of their current expiry date. NT’s rights to use these bands expire in 2025.
The other bands NBTC will reallocate include 1500MHz and 1800MHz.
NT president Col Sanphachai Huvanandana earlier said NT was adjusting its draft plan to migrate customers from the three bands set to expire to its 700MHz network for NBTC’s approval.
It also plans to ask the NBTC to extend its rights over the three spectrums set to expire for an additional 90 days to ensure a smooth customer migration.
Mr Somphop earlier said NT’s draft plan for the customer migration lacked important details. The NBTC needs to see the complete draft by end of this year to be able to approve it by early next year.
He said the NBTC had already set an initial timeline for the spectrum auctions under its spectrum management master plan for 2024-28.
Although in the past the previous NBTC board allowed NT to extend the spectrum use following the scheduled expiry dates to enable smooth customer migration, it was deemed as contradicting the spirit of the law and caused many problems, he added.
Mr Somphop said extensions for spectrum usage in the past were done through a transition period or a remedy period process which ruled that the service providers whose rights to use the spectrum bands expired would not be able to make a profit from such expired spectrum bands during the transition period.
This meant that private telecom operators, after deducting their operating costs, had to transfer all their net income from providing the service on the expired spectrum bands to the state coffers.
He said it was difficult for the NBTC to prove their actual operating costs during the transition period. This resulted in a lawsuit filed by the private telecom operators against the state which said the state had asked for higher income from them.
Currently NT is migrating its subscribers to the 700MHz band it won from a licence auction in 2020.
NT emerged as the result of the merger between two state telecom agencies — TOT and CAT Telecom.
Prior to the merger, TOT partnered with Advanced Info Service on TOT’s 2100MHz range.
NT, through the TOT deal, also partnered with the now defunct Total Access Communication on TOT’s 2300MHz band.
NT, through a deal with CAT, partnered with True Move H Universal Communication on CAT’s 850MHz band.
Board chairman Nattapon Nattasomboon earlier told the Bangkok Post NT had migrated its customers from the three bands to the 700MHz network at a rate of around 5,000 subscribers per day.
NT expects to migrate around 300,000 of its 700,000 active users from all its spectrum bands to the 700MHz network by the end of this year.