CAT, True willing to amend 3G service contracts
CAT Telecom and True Corp group are willing jointly to revise the contracts of their partnership for third-generation cellular service to make them comply with the Frequency Allocation Law, in line with the planned order to CAT from the National Broadcast
CAT chief executive officer Kitisak Sriprasert and True CEO Suphachai Chearavanont separately said yesterday that their companies were willing to amend the contracts jointly.
“We’re willing to revise the contracts as ordered by the NBTC,” Suphachai said.
The NBTC telecom committee is expected soon to issue an official order to CAT on the contract revision. This is in line with its approval on Wednesday to the conclusions of its subcommittee probing the legality of the CAT-True partnership deals.
According to part of the subcommittee’s conclusion after the probe, the telecom committee should order CAT to revise its contracts with True to make them fully compliant with Article 46 (2) of the 2010 Frequency Allocation Law. That article prohibits NBTC licence holders such as CAT and TOT from allowing third parties to take control of
their spectrum management.
The subcommittee concluded that in practice, CAT appeared not to have complete management control of its 800-megahertz spectrum being used under the partnership to provide wholesale-resale 3G service.
Kitisak said CAT was waiting for NBTC’s telecom committee to issue an official order to the agency to revise the contracts.
CAT and True have also been in negotiations in the past few months to seek ways out of the problems and the possible legal risks from the contracts.
The talks include the possible takeover of BFKT (Thailand)’s 3G-network equipment that BFKT has leased to CAT for wholesale of 3G bandwidth under the partnership.
WHOLESALING
As part of the partnership, BFKT of True has leased network equipment to CAT to wholesale 3G bandwidth capacity. The state agency has wholesaled such bandwidth to another True subsidiary, Real Move.
Kitisak said he also expected that True would rush to solve the problem of BFKT after the NBTC telecom committee on Wednesday passed a resolution ordering its officials to probe whether BFKT’s operation under the 3G partnership breached Article 7 of the Telecom Business Act.
The act says those operating a telecom business must have NBTC licences. If they operate without the licences, they will |be subject to a fine or imprisonment under Article 67 of the telecom law.
