04 TELECOM & DIGITAL ECONOMY
The 5G era expected to bring huge economic gains for Thailand Chadaphan Maliphan
As the world turns digital, the fifth-generation (5G) era is considered a global phenomenon of the future which will create tremendous economic benefits for Thailand in various industries. With as much as 100 times the speed of current wireless networks, together with significantly reduced latency and high accuracy, 5G not only helps to improve the efficiency of telecommunications such as mobile phones, it will also help to realise Industry 4.0 in Thailand. There will be plenty of business opportunities with the 5G technology, the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI), to create new products and services that will drive economic growth and job creation for decades to come. “Thailand’s 5G technology is expected to help drive the economy by at least 177 billion baht this year, accounting for 1.02 per cent of the country’s GDP,” according to Mr. Takorn Tantasith, former Secretar y-General of Thailand’s National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC), which is the government’s frequency allocation unit. He predicted that the value of the contribution to the Thai economy would be
UPDATE 3/2020
doubled in 2021, to 332 billion baht, and that it could rise fur ther to 476 billion baht in 2022.
Thailand’s 5G Development Thailand committed to developing the telecom infrastructure to enable the wide adoption of 5G wireless systems by 2020. The NBTC was assigned by the government in 2018 to facilitate the necessary infrastructure to achieve the goal of smart digital economy development under Thailand 4.0. After the two-year preparation for adopting 5G, the NBTC conducted the bidding for frequency allocation for mobile phone businesses, such as the 700 megahertz (MHz), 1800MHz, 2600MHz and 26GHz spectrum, on 16 February 2020. Three major mobile operators — Advanced Info Ser vice or AIS (owned by SingTel), Total Access Communication or dtac (owned by Norway’s Telenor Group), True Corp. (partly owned by China Mobile) and two State telecom enterprises CAT and TOT — bid a combined 100 billion baht at the auction. AIS was the biggest winner with 23 licences.
On the low-band 700 MHz spectrum, CAT won two licences, while AIS took one licence. A total of 19 Licenses for the mid-band 2600-MHz spectrum were taken by AIS and True, which won 10 and 9 licences, respectively. For the high-band 26GHz range divided into 26 licences, only dtac took part in this auction section and won two licences. AIS won the majority of 12, while True got eight and TOT won four of the remaining licences. The licence winner s must use the four spectrum ranges only for 5G networks. With the payment incentives provided, they must also develop the 5G network in the Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC) project in order to cover about 50 per cent of the area within one year of the licences being awarded. In addition, they must cover 50 per cent of the population in smar t city zones within four years.
5G testing centres in educational institutions The NBTC further funded a project to set up a centre at Chulalongkorn University (CU) for testing 5G wireless telecommunications
