Customers paying the price of murky dealing in Thai telecom sector

If granted, this would distort competition, since there was another bidder at the 4G auction, which withdrew when the price got too high. How fair is it to Dtac if True and AIS are now allowed to delay payment of their four-year concession fee? Changing the rules of the game yet allowing the two firms to keep the frequencies is laughable. If Dtac knew a big rebate was coming, it might have continued bidding and won! By changing the rules retrospectively, the state would distort that competition again, as it did in previous auctions. And with AIS and True now joining together to seek this benefit, are we not witnessing a cartel in action?
The Thai telecom sector must be one of the most dishonest and unfair in the business field. Remember the previous joke of auctions with fixed prices – and one adjusted after True’s demands? Then this troublemaker polluted the business environment with a fight over partial foreign ownership in one of the two companies. Even worse came during Thaksin Shinawatra’s much-admired democratic administration, which unashamedly awarded big economic benefits to his own telecom company, AIS, enabling it to grow faster and bigger. The Thai telecom sector appears to be one long saga of dishonesty and distortion of competition, with a real whiff of nationalism.
And there are more problems brewing. With such a rapid expansion of their customer base, do the two companies now have sufficient money to build modern technical infrastructure capable of serving customers with clear and fast lines for talk and data? Is there any independent body out there to measure and check if signals are as required? 
If AIS and True get their payback extension, they will have more money for the coming auction. The Thai state is relieving them of paying the price for their former failure while at the same time penalising Dtac over its decision to drop out of the auction to save money. Extending the payback will likely mean more state-aided distortion of competition at the coming auction.
It appears that the honourable Dtac is ever the loser against two aggressive competitors who appear to have influential friends able to adjust auction conditions and who knows, delay deals, such as on the cooperation between TOT and Dtac – which authorities never seem to finalise. Why? Is the foreign owner in question here of the wrong kind to successfully deal with a Thai and Thai-Chinese business environment and state bodies involved?
A Johnsen
Prachuap Khiri Khan