Thailand’s telecom regulator has told True Corp to review and improve its remedial measures, saying its response to an outage that inconvenienced millions of mobile and internet users this week was inadequate.
The incident that began on Thursday morning and affected users nationwide has also led researchers and consumer advocates to press for steps to counter the lack of competition in the Thai mobile market.
Officials with the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC) met with True executives on Friday to review its response to the outage, which the company said was caused by a power system failure at a core network centre.
“This required careful inspection and time to resolve,” True said in a statement.
“Our engineering team worked urgently to identify the root cause and took immediate steps to mitigate the impact by gradually migrating customers to another core network centre to restore services as quickly as possible.”
True apologised to the affected customers and said they would receive 10 gigabytes (GB) of free data and 100 minutes of free calls, valid for 24 hours. It sent them notifications with compensation details via SMS on Thursday afternoon.
However, Trairat Viriyasirikul, the acting secretary-general of the NBTC, said the company should have done more.
He said it said should offer more than 10GB of free data and more than 100 minutes of free calls, and without limiting validity to 24 hours.
As well, he said, it should use other methods besides SMS to communicate with customers about compensation.
Structural issues
The True incident was indicative of deeper structural issues within Thailand’s telecommunications sector, said Somkiat Tangkitvanich, the president of the Thailand Development Research Institute (TDRI).
He said the current market, dominated by just two major providers — True-DTAC and AIS-3BB — following recent mergers, has resulted in decreased service reliability, including slower speeds and unstable signals.
A recent survey revealed that 81% of users reported network problems in the past six months, with the majority occurring on networks involved in the mergers.
Mr Somkiat warned that a duopoly could hinder the development of Thailand’s digital economy, which relies heavily on robust IT infrastructure.
To address these challenges, he urged the government to liberalise the telecom market, starting with allowing US companies to enter and compete. This approach, he said, could also strengthen Thailand’s position in trade negotiations with the United States.
Mr Somkiat also called on the NBTC to enforce international service standards and impose penalties based on the duration of disruptions, citing practices in Australia, the UK and the US, where companies have faced multimillion-dollar fines for similar incidents.
He recommended the NBTC require providers to disclose outage details, causes, estimated repair times and network performance by area to consumers.
Jutha Sangkachart, a member of the telecom subcommittee of the Consumer Council of Thailand, said Thursday’s outage affected about 58% of the country’s mobile subscribers.
She said this highlighted both a lack of market competition and vulnerabilities in the nation’s cybersecurity framework.
Ms Jutha expressed concern that if state-owned National Telecom (NT) were to exit the market, Thailand would become overly reliant on the two private telecom giants.
Some consumers still view NT as a crucial third option, underscoring demand for more choices in the telecom space, she noted.
Ms Jutha called on the government to support NT and develop it into a competitive third player.
NT currently has an estimated 1.4 million mobile subscribers, compared with 56 million for True and 46 million for AIS.