Dispute continues over DTAC's unpaid fees
Bangkok Post
Friday, September 7, 2007
By Komsan Tortermvasana
The Information and Communications Technology (ICT) ministry is encouraging TOT
Plc to sue DTAC for its failure to pay access charges since November of last
year.
The ministry has asked the Council of State, the government's legal advisory
body, whether TOT could sue the mobile operator directly, even though DTAC holds
its concession from TOT's sibling agency, CAT Telecom.
DTAC and True Move, another CAT concessionaire, have been refusing to pay access
charges for use of the TOT network. Instead they are paying each other
interconnection charges, which were introduced last year by the industry
regulator, the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC).
Normally, the operators would pay the access charges to CAT, which would then
forward the money to TOT.
TOT, which earned 14.8 billion baht from access charges last year, has been
refusing to adopt the new interconnection regime, fearing it would earn less
money than under the old system.
Dr Sitthichai said that access and interconnection charges had been in arrears
for the past four or five months with no government agency able to settle the
dispute.
Complicating matters was the fact that no one had dared to state clearly whether access charges should be scrapped permanently and replaced with interconnection
fees, the rates that operators charge each other for calls carried over
different networks.
Any further delay would harm the industry, particularly TOT, which is already
seeing sharp declines in revenue, he said.
Therefore, he said, the dispute should be settled in court.
A TOT source said the state agency had not taken DTAC to court because of the
existing NTC regulation, which was tantamount to law.
If TOT went ahead with court action, it would probably lose the case, he
acknowledged.
Djit Laowattana, a TOT board member, said the agency opposed the scrapping of access charge payments and had attempted to punish DTAC and True Move by
blocking access to the TOT network for their combined 24 million customers.
However, the NTC said -- and Dr Sitthichai and others agreed -- that such
retaliation was unfair and inappropriate.
Another industry source said that even the NTC itself lacked the courage to push
for universal adoption of interconnection charges, since the issue is
politically sensitive.
It even asked the ICT ministry for some guidance about maintaining an access-charge system between TOT and CAT Telecom.
However, the NTC has also acknowledged that access charges resulted in high
costs for operators and were deterring free competition, which would increase
costs for end users.
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