Thailand’s 4G auctions have been postponed for a year by the country’s interim military government.
Although the regulator NBTC (National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission) had scheduled them for June this year, the auctions have now been pushed to July 2015 while the military’s National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) reviews the process.
The NCPO has stated that the delay is necessary to introduce regulation that would allow the auction process to be complete in a fully transparent fashion.
The delay could prove problematic for market leader AIS, which as yet does not hold any 4G spectrum. It could lose ground to some of its major rivals, which hold the required capacity. AIS itself has claimed that it has contingency plans in place to compensate for this.
AIS, which has around 45% of the market share with 43 million connections, is firmly ahead of DTAC and True, which respectively have 29 million and 23 million subscribers. However, the latter two operators already hold 4G capacity.
