The Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Ministry will seek Finance Ministry scrutiny of corporate taxes paid by telecom operators involved in paying interconnection charges to see if they are passing the charge burden on to consumers.

ICT Minister Sitthichai Pookaiyaudom said the investigations would aim at not only finding out if they had passed the interconnection burden to their subscribers, but also whether they were really paying the interconnection charge to one another.

Advanced Info Service (AIS), Total Access Communication (DTAC) and True Move signed bilateral interconnection-fee deals late last year and began officially billing one another for the interconnection charges this month.

The National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) introduced the interconnection regime last April, requiring all telecom operators to share voice and data revenue between the two networks involved in calls.

"The probe will ensure that consumers are not being affected by the interconnection charges," the minister said.

He added that several parties had pointed out the difficulty for outsiders to track real call traffic among telecom operators, making it hard for a third party to identify actual interconnection fee payment and whether the operators are, in fact, making interconnection charge payments to one another.

The ICT minister recently proposed that TOT set up a new company, ICT Thailand, to be a neutral party for settling interconnection charges among telecom operators.

AIS and DTAC have agreed on a termination rate of Bt1 per minute, which is the fee paid by the network of the caller to the network of the receiver. If DTAC transits a call via AIS to a third network, it will pay a transit fee of Bt1 per minute to AIS. However, when AIS transits a call via DTAC to a third network, the transit rate will be only 50 satang a minute. Both termination and transit rates will be reviewed once a year.

DTAC and True Move have agreed on a termination rate of Bt1 per minute and a transit rate of 20 satang a minute, while AIS and True Move have agreed on a termination rate of Bt1 per minute. AIS will charge True Move a transit rate of Bt1 per minute while True Move will charge AIS a transit rate of only 20 satang per minute.

AIS has more than 18 million subscribers, DTAC 12 million and True Move almost 6 million.

As well as the big three, all other telecom operators except TOT are currently negotiating the interconnection charges.

TOT opposes the interconnection charge out of concern that DTAC and True Move will walk away from its access charge arrangements.

The access charge is a cost against all cellular operators of CAT Telecom, include DTAC, True Move and Digital Phone, for connecting to different networks via TOT's facilities.

DTAC and True Move want to pay only the interconnection charge, instead of both access and interconnection charges, but TOT, which earns about Bt14 billion per year from access charges, says they must stick to the deal.

Telecom Reporters

The Nation