TOT seeks backing for 10-digit numbers
STATE TELECOM agency TOT has asked private telecom operators and the government to help financially support its plan to upgrade nationwide fixed-telephone numbers to 10 digits from the current nine digits, TOT president Montchai Noosong said.
He added that the state agency is unlikely to be able to afford the cost of the upgrade of Bt21 billion.
Montchai said that mobile-phone operators would mainly benefit from the upgrade to the 10-digit number, as it would increase mobile phone numbers. However, TOT’s fixed-telephone service will not gain any benefit, given it is a less popular service, he said.
TOT’s revenue per subscriber for its fixed-telephone-line service is continuing to decline.
“It’s not fair to TOT. We’ll have to invest for the others to gain,” Montchai said.
According to the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission’s new numbering plan, all fixed-line numbers will be added with 1 after the first digit 0, followed by the existing numbers. For an example, the existing number 02xxxxxxx will be changed to 012xxxxxxx.
The NBTC telecom committee is expected to approve this new numbering plan soon. As the owner of all fixed-telephone numbers nationwide under its concessions, TOT has to take the lead in the upgrade of the fixed-telephone numbers.
The upgrade will expand the total mobile-phone numbers to 760 million from the combined 260 million used and idle numbers, while the fixed-telephone numbers will increase two times to 100 million. The number expansion is expected to take five years, starting from 2017, to complete.
The mobile-phone operators hold a combined 184 million numbers, of which 100 million are being used. The watchdog now has only 72 million mobile-phone numbers available for allocation.
Currently TOT has 1.4 million fixed-telephone subscribers. This does not include 1.26 million users of True Corp and 384,000 users of TT&T, which operate under TOT concessions. True and TT&T’s concessions will end on October 2017 and October 2018. True is expected to spend around Bt500 million on the upgrade in one year to serve the 10-digit policy, while the mobile operators all together need to invest between Bt30 million and Bt90 million for upgrade in one year.
