Regulator tells clearinghouse to give porting data

The office requested information of porting made from April 1 to May 10. The information has to be submitted to it by May 14. The move followed the debut of 2.1GHz cellular service by some licence holders last week.

Clearinghouse was co-founded by five telecom operators to handle the mobile phone number porting, which enables mobile-phone users to switch to new networks and can keep using existing mobile-phone numbers with the networks they switch to.

Clearinghouse can handle porting of 4,000 subscribers a day from each of the five telecom operators.

"The NBTC has to closely monitor the porting to ensure the process complies with regulations," NBTC deputy secretary-general Korkij Danchaivachit said.

Last week Advanced Info Service (AIS) disclosed that its 2.1GHz service subsidiary Advanced Wireless Network (AWN) now has 800,000 subscribers, who were migrated from AIS network via two ways – porting and the call transit process. But it declined to specify how many were migrated via porting and via call transit. It just said 60 per cent of them are postpaid mobile users.

An NBTC source said it doubted if NBTC regulations permitted a customer migration via the call transit system. NBTC secretary general Takorn Tantasit said the office was looking into this.

Takorn said he had already asked AIS about its customer migration and it told him that only customers migrated via complete porting would belong to AWN, while those migrated via call transit still belonged to AIS.

critical issue

Takorn said the issue of what networks customers "belong to" must be made clear, as it could have an impact on the annual concession revenue TOT has gained from AIS, its concession holder.

Holders each pay an average of 25 per cent of gross revenue as a concession fee, while NBTC licence holders each pay an average 6 per cent of gross revenue as an anual licence fee.

Executives of Total Access Communication (DTAC) and True Corp said they were not in hurry to port customers from their networks to their 2.1GHz operator subsidiaries, depending on the expansion of Clearinghouse’s porting capacity.

AIS chief executive officer Wichian Mektrakarn said five telecom operators are expected to jointly expand the combined porting capacity to 100,000 in June.

Telecom industrialists suspect that AIS, with over 37 million subscribers, has felt the pressure to hurriedly migrate a number of existing customers to AWN’s 2.1GHz network to unload the burden from its existing conventional network, using 900 MHz spectrum.

All the three 2.1GHz licence holders – AWN, Real Future, and dtac TriNet, formerly known as DTAC Network – have targeted 10 million customers this year.