NTC may lower bid price

       The national telecom regulator's board might set a starting bid price for a 3G-2.1GHz-spectrum licence at lower than US$100 million (Bt3.33 billion), a source at the National telecommunications Commission (NTC) said.
       The source said that some commissioners proposed in the recent board meeting that the starting price range should be between $50 million and almost $100 million per licence.
       All the commissioners agreed that the starting bid should be different from the reserve price. The reserve price is the minimum amount the watchdog expects to gain from each of the auctioned licences.
       The board will convene next week to conclude the amount of the starting bid price and the reserve price, the source added.
       The NTC will auction four 3G licences.
       The NTC members have kept insisting that the overall licence cost would not be too high so as to avoid hurting the bidders financially.
       The NTC will hold the second public hearing on the conditions of auctioning the 3G licences at the end of this month. One topic is the contingency plan for the case in which the number of qualified bidders is less than or the same as the available licences. In this case, there would be no genuine competition in the auction.
       NTC deputy secretary-general Prasert Apipunya said the contingency plan had three optional measures: put off the auction; the NTC could set a fixed licence price at the auction time and award the licences to the bidders that can pay for them; or the NTC would reduce the number of available licences to promote real bidding competition.
       The NTC recently held the first mock-up auction to prepare potential bidders to understand the auction proces.s
       Advanced Info Service's chief executive officer Wichian Mektrakarn said AIS had hired consulting firm Detacon to advise its 3G-licence bidding. He said AIS won the licence bid in the mock-up auction. AIS targeted the licence with 15MHz bandwidth and "won" it after quoting $173 million.
       In the mock-up auction, the NTC set the starting price of the licence with 15MHz bandwidth at $150 million and the other three licences, each featuring 10MHz bandwidth, at $100 million.