CAT board to meet Monday on bandwidth issue
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CAT Telecom's board will meet on Monday to approve the plan to return 5 megahertz of bandwidth held by Total Access Communication (DTAC) on the 1,800MHz spectrum to the regulator to be included in an auction.
Then CAT will submit this plan to the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission, which will take it up at its meeting on the following day, Takorn Tantasith, secretary-general of the NBTC, said yesterday.
The NBTC will have 30MHz to auction off, instead 25MHz, if it decides to include the 5MHz.
It had planned to offer two licences with 12.5MHz bandwidth each, but some telecom operators took the view that if 30MHz were made available, there should be three licences with 10MHz each.
Takorn said the number of licences up for grabs could change, pending the completion of public hearings on the draft auction plan, which will run from late this month to August 3.
To prevent conspiring among bidders, the draft auction plan states that the NBTC will raise the starting price to 100 per cent of spectrum value, up from the present 70 per cent, if the number of bidders matches the number of licences.
On Monday, the NBTC’s telecom committee set the starting price at Bt464 million per megahertz, which is 70 per cent of the full value of Bt663 million per megahertz.
If the NBTC decides to auction a licence for two 12.5MHz bands, one for uplink and the other for downlink, the starting price for the dual-band licence will be Bt11.6 billion. The starting price will go up to Bt16.575 billion if there are only two bidders.
