An independent telecom specialist will file a legal challenge in the Administrative Court on Wednesday against the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission, saying its plan to auction 3G licences on Oct 16 does not benefit Thais.
The filing will ask the court to suspend the auction until the NBTC issues more conditions that give the most benefit to the Thai people, complying with constitutional law that rules frequencies are a national limited resource. Therefore the auction must give the most benefit to the people.
Anuparp Thiralarp, an independent telecom specialist, said the auction's conditions do not have four important items needed to benefit the people.
He said there is a lack of conditions to control the quality of signals for mobile services in order to guarantee speed capacity when in use and the NBTC has set no pricing tariff for data use so operators can charge the highest possible rates.
Moreover, there is nothing assist disadvantaged or poor people in remote areas.
His final point is that the NBTC has not clearly determined how the auction fees can be distributed to benefit the public or be returned to state coffers.
NBTC member Pravit Leesatapornwongsa said the court may reject the filing because Mr Anuparp is not affected directly by the auction.
Unlike previous auctions held by the now-defunct National Telecommunications Commission, the NBTC is fully authorised to take its own action under the Frequency Allocation Act 2010.
The major three mobile operators have already submitted their application forms for the 3G spectrum auction which is set for Oct 16.
There are Advance Wireless Network (AWN), a subsidiary of the biggest mobile operator AIS, DTAC’s subsidiary DTAC Network and Real Future, a subsidiary of True Corp.
The qualified bidders will be announced on Oct 9. Disqualified firms can appeal within three days of the result.
The bid winners will be announced on Oct 22.
The auction will offer nine 5-MHz slots out of 45 MHz of bandwidth on the 2.1-GHz spectrum.
The reserve price for a 5-MHz block of the spectrum has been set at 4.5 billion baht. The auction will be an ascending bid, with each participant allowed to buy up to 15 times.