TOT to withdraw suit against NTC

This will be done in an effort to bury the hatchet with the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC).

TOT board chairman Teravuti Boonyasopon said recently it did not want to have legal problems with any party, especially the NTC, but preferred to settle thorny issues through negotiation and compromise. "We want to show our respect to the NTC," he said.

NTC chairman Choochart Promphrasid said the move signalled a positive change in the relations between the two.

The TOT's previous board had filed its suit at the Central Administrative Court claiming that the NTC, which owns TOT's licences, has no regulatory power to collect the numbers fee from TOT, given that the agency owned the numbers before the NTC was set up more than three years ago. TOT's overdue numbers fee is Bt200 million.

Teravuti said the state agency would ask for a reduction of the overdue payment from its 100-per-cent shareholder, the Finance Ministry.

Under the frequency allocation law, the NTC will return its regulatory revenues, including the licence and numbers fees, to the state coffers after expenses.

Teravuti added that, after this, TOT was also willing to return to the practice of paying the numbers fee to the NTC.

However, TOT will not withdraw another case against the NTC at the Central Administrative Court, a suit that claims the watchdog has no authority to impose interconnection-charge regulations, which affects TOT's business.

"We already discussed this case with the NTC and we agreed that we both should wait for the court to make its decision," Teravuti said.

TOT is also willing to pay a fine of Bt60,000 per day to the NTC for rejecting the order of the NTC's dispute settlement panel that TOT must enter into negotiations with Total Access Communication (DTAC) to jointly determine the interconnection fee they will charge each other. At present, the fine amounts to Bt2 million.

The NTC's interconnection regulations mandate that the networks of callers pay the interconnection fee on a bilateral basis to those of receivers.

TOT views the regulations as affecting its existing access-charge regulations, which mandate that private mobile-phone concessions of CAT Telecom pay the access charge to TOT for routing customers' calls to other networks via TOT's network.

DTAC and True Move, which hold CAT's concessions, stopped paying the access charge to TOT in November 2006 and have adopted the NTC's interconnection regulations instead. This prompted TOT to file its lawsuit to demand more than Bt14 billion of their combined overdue access charge.