NBTC moves to regulate tourist sim cards

“We have a plan to separate tourist sim cards from local sim cards by adding some features that define the location on them. This kind of sim card has already been launched in Malaysia and should help the state in terms of cyber security,” Takorn said during a meeting of the Asian Telecommunications Regulatory Council, at which all 10 Asean countries were represented.
Korkij Danchaivichit , the NBTC’s deputy secretary-general, said the NBTC office needed more time to study the strategic plan for tourist sim cards with the Customs Department and other government agencies.
There are around 103 million mobile-phone subscriptions registered in Thailand, but the authorities have never separately regulated tourist sim cards.
Foreign visitors can currently choose from a range of promotional sim cards offered by the Kingdom’s mobile-phone operators and targeting international arrivals.
Korkij said that apart from national security reasons, the plan to regulate this type of card should help the NBTC in terms of its overall number-allocation plan.
The regulator has assigned a total of 217 million numbers to mobile-phone operators, but only 103 million are currently taken up and 20 million numbers are non-active, he said.
Moreover, the NBTC is waiting for 39 million numbers assigned to TOT and CAT Telecom to be returned following the expiration of certain concession contracts, while the remainder are in the merchandise channel and therefore not in use, he added.
“The tourist sim card will ease any shortage in the numbering plan by reusing the numbers within a shorter period,” he explained.
Takorn said the NBTC office would propose the plan to its telecom committee soon.
He told yesterday’s meeting that Thailand’s mobile-phone “population” stood at more than 130 per cent of the number of citizens in the country.
At any one time, almost half of the nation’s population is communicating online through their mobile phones, he added. Thailand is second only to Japan in terms of the number of users of the instant messaging platform Line, with 33 million user accounts.
Line stickers have become one of the most efficient ways to communicate and express feelings for Thais.
Thailand also has roughly 30 million accounts on Facebook. When the Facebook Live service first started earlier this year, within weeks the Kingdom became one of the top user countries, with online sellers, celebrities and journalists having their own live broadcasts, the secretary-general said.
Moreover, the upmarket shopping mall, Siam Paragon, was also once named the No-1 “most-Instagrammed place” in the world.
The number of mobile subscriptions in Thailand has risen from 75 million – mostly 2G – in 2011 to 103 million today, of which about 101 million subscriptions are on 3G services.
Half of those subscriptions are operated by smart phones, while 4G usage is also rising to replace 3G following the NBTC’s recent 4G licence auction, Takorn said, adding that 4G networks would cover 80 per cent of the population within eight years.
He also told the meeting that 4G services in Thailand would create an economic benefit totalling around Bt1.3 trillion over the next five years.
That is more than Bt250 billion per year of economic-value creation from their use in various industries such as finance, transportation, real estate, tourism, education, public health, and e-government services.
On the ICT Development Index, published by the International Telecommunication Union, Thailand has jumped the highest number of places among Asia-Pacific countries, especially after the spread of 3G services from 2013 to 2015, with the country’s ranking rising from 92nd to 74th, Takorn said.