The operator has to pay first installment due from LTE spectrum auction by March 21
Thailand’s telecom regulator NBTC threatened to file a lawsuit against local mobile operator Jasmine International if the company fails to pay the first installment of the THB 75 billion ($2.1 billion) it bid for a license to operate spectrum in the 900 MHz band. The regulator also threatened Jasmine with the revocation of operating licenses.
The two 900 MHz license winners, Jasmine and True Corp, have until March 21 to pay the first installment of the LTE license fee. The regulator said it may have to organize a new spectrum auction if Jasmine fails to meet the deadline. True Corp CFO Noppadol Dej-udom recently said the company was ready to meet the payment and bank guarantee conditions.
According to local press reports, Jasmine has faced difficulty securing a bank loan to pay for the license due to the high cost. Jasmine is in talks with potential joint venture partners in Singapore and Malaysia, with one possible candidate being Singaporean state investment vehicle Temasek Holding or its majority-owned subsidiary SingTel.
Jasmine previously announced plans to invest THB 25 billion to roll out its LTE wireless broadband network over the next three years. Half of the budget is set to be used this year and the company expects to attract at least 10 million LTE customers by 2018.
Current mobile operators in Thailand are Advanced Info Service, Total Access Communication (DTAC) and True Move.
ZTE launches new RF platform
Chinese ICT services provider ZTE launched its next-generation radio frequency platform. The new ZXMW SRU2 platform is said to allow operators to meet growing capacity demand for mobile networks, especially in the 3G and LTE segments.
The SRU2 is said to features multiple modulation schemes from 4096 quadrature phase shift keying to quadrature amplitude modulation, and its maximum RF bandwidth for one single channel can support up to 112 megahertz. The Chinese firm said with this RF performance one single carrier could transmit up to a 1.3 gigabit per second service without using a cross polarization interference canceller configuration. Compared with the current 2048QAM with 56 megahertz bandwidth solutions, the SRU2 can provide a 218% higher throughput.
“A key highlight of the SRU2 is its ‘dual carrier aggregation mode.’ With this innovative technology, one single SRU2 unit can support two RF carrier transmissions saving half the hardware costs of traditional RF configurations,” ZTE said.
ZTE’s ZXMW SRU2 platform will be commercially available in 2016.
