TUC offers AIS free use of its 900MHz band until end of May
ONE of the winners in last year’s 900MHz licence auction, True Move H Universal Communication (TUC), has offered the use of its 900MHz band free of charge to Advanced Info Service (AIS) until the end of May.
The proposal is aimed at ensuring the minimum impact on AIS’s 2G customers given that AIS has to shut down its 900MHz service once the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission awards the licence to TUC, True Corp chief executive officer Suphachai Chearavanont said yesterday.
TUC made a similar proposal to AIS earlier this week, but on the condition that its rival had to pay Bt450 million per month for spectrum use.
NBTC secretary-general Takorn Tantasith said the regulator would wait until Monday for AIS to consider TUC’s proposal.
The NBTC might delay the date for actually granting the licence to TUC until March 21 in order to give time for AIS to move its users to TUC’s 900MHz band, he said.
“If AIS refuses this TUC proposal, the NBTC may have no choice but to order it to shut down its 2G service next week, on the day that the telecom committee grants the 900MHz licence to TUC,” he added.
The telecom committee is due to convene on Monday to consider awarding the licence to TUC, and is expected to grant the licence the same day.
Once the licence is awarded, AIS has to shut down its 2G 900MHz service so that the NBTC can reallocate the licence to TUC.
AIS is expected to announce its position on Monday, stating that customers would be able to be continue to use 2G service.
Around 400,000 2G customers will be affected once AIS shuts down the 2G service.
AIS has 8.4 million 2G users in total, of whom 8 million are on its affiliate Advanced Wireless Network (AWN), with the remainder on its own network.
Once AIS shuts down the service, it has to stop using these 400,000 phone numbers.
The NBTC held meetings with TUC, AIS and state agency TOT on Wednesday and Thursday to seek ways to prevent AIS 2G customers from being adversely affected.
Bt450m per month
TUC proposed that AIS could use its 900MHz band to serve these 2G customers, at a cost of Bt450 million per month, but AIS declined to accept its rival’s proposal.
AIS said the 8 million 2G users with dual-band (900 MHz and 1,800MHz) handsets at AWN could still roam with Total Access Communication (DTAC).
For 400,000 customers on its own network, it would roam them on 5MHz of the 900MHz band of Jas Mobile Broadband, the other 900MHz licence winner, it said.
The regulator told AIS that it could not do so, as the NBTC had to keep the 900MHz band for Jas.
Suphachai yesterday said he did not understand why AIS kept insisting it would use the Jas band, instead of TUC’s. AIS was acting as if it had won the licence, not Jas, he suggested.
AIS’s network roaming with DTAC’s 1800MHz will cover only 3 million to 4 million of AIS’s 2G subscribers, given that 1800MHz has smaller coverage in rural areas than 900MHz, he added.
TUC completed payment of the first instalment of the licence upfront fee – Bt8.04 billion, plus value added tax of Bt562 million – to the NBTC yesterday, and handed over a bank guarantee for the remaining upfront value of Bt73.036 billion, including VAT.
