This paper is a part of the Telecom Regulatory Environment (TRE) assessment
conducted by LIRNEasia and Thailand Development Research Institute (TDRI). A perception
survey of informed stakeholders of Thailand’s telecom sector, representing service providers,
academics, security analysts, journalists and civil society, was conducted during
February‐March 2011. The effectiveness of the regulatory and policy environment in Thailand’s
fixed line, mobile and broadband market were evaluated by the respondents, along seven
different regulatory dimensions: market entry, access to scarce resources, interconnection, tariff
regulation, regulation of anticompetitive practices, universal service obligation (USO) and quality
of service (QoS). The Lickert scale of 1 to 5 was adopted in this evaluation where 1 stands for
‘high ineffective’ while 5 represents ‘highly effective’.
According to the 2010/11 TRE assessment, Thailand’s performance obtained an overall score
for all dimension at 2.7, which is below the average score of 3.0. Even the regulatory dimension
which received highest score, the USO, still gets a below average score. The two regulatory
dimensions that dragged down Thailand’s performance are interconnection and market entry,
especially market entry in mobile market which received the lowest score of all, 2.3. The low
score reflected respondents’ dissatisfaction with the regulatory agency’s failure to intervene in
the interconnection dispute between a large and a smaller cellular phone operator in the market
that eventually led to the exit of the latter. For market entry, the main concern arises from Article
45 of the new Telecom & Broadcasting Act of 2010 whose wording can be interpreted as
prohibiting the leasing of telecom network. Confusion regarding the different types of licenses
was another concern about market entry