One legal hurdle for 900MHz auction cleared

The Council of State has advised TOT that it was required to hand the spectrum over to the NBTC for reallocation, the commission’s secretary-general Takorn Tantasith said yesterday.

The Information and Communica-tions Technology Ministry forwarded the Council of State’s decision to the NBTC yesterday. The commission will call bids for two 900-megahertz licences today from four contenders.

TOT consulted the Council of State last month on whether the telecom agency was entitled to keep the 900MHz spectrum after the Advanced Info Service (AIS) concession ended. The council replied that the NBTC’s master plan obliged all state agencies to transfer their frequencies to the commission for reallocation once their concessions granted to private companies expired.

The council sent its opinion to the ICT Ministry last Wednesday.

TOT had granted a 900MHz concession to AIS. The NBTC reclaimed the spectrum after the concession expired on September 30 this year.

The Office of the Ombudsman last week recommended that the TOT chairman and the Finance Ministry permanent secretary examine the legal aspects of whether the NBTC’s 900MHz auction today would damage TOT. It also suggested that both consider filing a case against the auction at the Central Administrative Court, if it were found that the auction financially affected TOT.

The Ombudsman’s opinion on the matter followed its receipt of a complaint by the TOT labour union on possible impacts of the auction on TOT.

Yesterday the ICT Ministry instructed the TOT board to convene to consider the Council of State’s reply and the Ombudsman’s opinion.

Takorn said the Office of the Auditor-General had advised Prime Minister General Prayut Chan-o-cha that the NBTC should auction only one 900MHz licence, but Takorn insisted to the PM’s staff that the commission would press ahead with the auction of two licences.

The four bidders for the 900MHz licences are Advanced Wireless Network (AWN) of AIS, True Move H Universal Communication (TUC) of True Corp, DTAC TriNet of Total Access Communication (DTAC) and Jas Mobile Broadband of Jasmine International.

Takorn said the final prices of the 900MHz licences might not be as high as for the 1,800MHz licence auctioned last month.

Two blocks

The first 900MHz block is a pair of 895MHz-905MHz/940MHz-950MHz licences, while the second block is a pair of 905MHz-915MHz/950MHz-960MHz licences. Each 900MHz licence contains 10MHz of bandwidth and is valid for 15 years. Each 1,800MHz licence carries 15MHz of bandwidth and is good for 18 years.

The minimum starting bid for a 900MHz licence is Bt12.864 billion. The four participants are required to kick off the auction by raising the bid to Bt13.508 billion, which means the state will get at least Bt27.016 billion from the two licences after the bidding starts.

Then the bidders are allowed to raise the bid by a fixed Bt644 million in each of the following rounds until it reaches 100 per cent of the full spectrum value of Bt16.080 billion. After that they can raise the bid by a fixed Bt322 million per round.

The starting price of the 1800MHz licence is Bt15.912 billion. The four bidders were required to start by raising price to Bt16.708 billion, followed by the fixed Bt796 million in each of the following rounds until the bid price reaches 100 per cent of full spectrum price at Bt19.890 billion. After that they were required to raise the price at fixed Bt398 million per round.

The bidding will start at 9am today and run until 9pm before breaking for three hours. It will resume at midnight and run until 6am the following day before breaking for three hours and resuming at 9am.

The auction will be held on the third and 11th floors of the NBTC head office on Paholyothin Soi 8.

After 33 hours of marathon bidding, which started on November 11, TUC secured the first 1,800MHz licence block with a final bid of Bt39.792 billion, while AWN secured the second block by offering Bt40.986 billion. The average price of the licence is Bt2.692 billion per MHz.