NBTC panel to study 'effects' of concession expiries
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The office of the National Broad-casting and Telecommunications Commission has appointed a committee to study how to deal with the approaching expiry of the concessions of TrueMove and Digital Phone Co (DPC) and possible impacts on their more than 17 mill
Settapong Malisuwan, chairman of the NBTC’s telecom committee, revealed this yesterday.
The TrueMove and DPC concessions will end in September next year, at which time each of them must return their 12.5 megahertz of bandwidth of the 1,800MHz spectrum to the NBTC for reallocation. TrueMove has about 17 million subscribers and DPC about 98,000. Both hold CAT Telecom concessions.
The NBTC plans to auction their blocks of the 1,800MHz spectrum after completing the auction of 2.1-gigahertz spectrum licences in the third quarter, and six months before their concessions end.
Settapong said the 1,800MHz spectrum would attract several bidders as it could be used to provide fourth-generation broadband cellular service. He said the price of 1,800MHz spectrum blocks might be higher than those of the 2.1GHz spectrum.
For its sale of the 2.1GHz spectrum licences, the NBTC is likely to auction nine slots each containing 5MHz of bandwidth, to promote real bidding competition.
It will finalise soon the maximum number of slots the bidders will be able to pitch for. The NBTC owns total bandwidth of 45MHz.
Settapong said that if, for example, there were four bidders each targeting three slots, this would mean they were targeting a combination of 12 slots, versus the nine available. This would result in fierce competition, given the supply of spectrum slots is lower than the demand.
The NBTC is expected to spend Bt40 million on organising the auction.
He added that the telecom committee’s 2.1GHz management subcommittee would fine-tune the details of this method before submitting it for the committee’s approval.
Wichian Mektrakarn, chief executive officer of Advanced Info Service, said it needed a total of 15 MHz of the 2.1GHz spectrum to serve its 33 million customers efficiently.
However, AIS will wait to see NBTC’s final auction plan for the 1,800MHz spectrum before deciding how much of the 2.1GHz spectrum it will bid for.
AIS is also interested in bidding for 1,800MHz spectrum licences to provide 4G service.
The telecom committee is expected to finalise the details of the auction method this month, the licence reserve price in May, and the auction terms and conditions in June, Settapong said.
The committee is poised to hire a group of lecturers from Chulalongkorn University’s economics faculty to work out the 2.1GHz licence reserve price – the price the NBTC thinks is appropriate.
The 2.1GHz reserve price will be used as a base to calculate that of the 1,800MHz spectrum price too, Settapong added.
