The referee is well defended

On 29 June 2025 Thailand put four bands of radio spectrum up for auction — 850, 1500, 2100 and 2300 MHz, twenty-three blocks in all.

Two companies took part.

They were Advanced Wireless Network, of the AIS group, and True Move H Universal Communication. Bidding opened at 09.30 and closed at 10.48. The regulator announced a total of ฿41,273,960,346 before VAT.

The result, band by band, is the story. Nobody bid for 850 MHz. Advanced Wireless Network took all three blocks at 2100 MHz. True Move H took all seven blocks at 2300 MHz and four of the eleven at 1500 MHz. Each band that sold went to a single company. Nine of the twenty-three blocks found no buyer.

Now hold that next to a second fact. Those two companies are the Thai mobile market. The regulator’s own auction memorandum, counting subscribers at the end of September 2024, put True Move H at 54.29 per cent and Advanced Wireless Network at 43.00 per cent — 97.29 per cent between them — with NT, the state operator, at 2.66 per cent and the virtual operators at 0.05 per cent. The same document puts the market’s concentration index at 4,803, on a scale where 10,000 means a single firm holds everything.

An auction is a machine for turning competition into a price. It works when bidders are made to bid against each other for the same thing, and the public — which owns the spectrum — receives the difference between what the asset is worth and what the state would have accepted.

This auction’s rules say what the state would have accepted. Each band had a reserve price per block and a price step, and bidding opened at the reserve plus one step — the lowest price at which anything could sell.

• 2100 MHz opened at ฿4,950 million a block. Three blocks sold for ฿14,850,000,010: the opening price.
• 1500 MHz opened at ฿1,163.49 million a block. Four sold for ฿4,653,960,168: the opening price.
• 2300 MHz opened at ฿2,856.15 million a block. Seven sold for ฿21,770,000,168, about ฿3,110 million a block: some nine per cent above the opening.

Two of the three bands that sold went at the lowest price the rules allowed. The third moved. The fourth drew no bid at all.

That is not an accusation against anyone who bid. Bidding in an auction you are entitled to enter, at prices the regulator published in advance, is not misconduct. It is a description of what an auction can and cannot deliver when there are fewer bidders than there are things for sale.

How the market got to two

Thailand had three private mobile network operators, and then it did not.

The amalgamation of True and dtac completed on 1 March 2023. Later that year, on 15 November 2023, the AIS group completed its acquisition of the broadband operator 3BB.

Both were lawful, both were examined by the regulator, and both are matters of public record. The article reports the dates and makes no claim about the process or the decisions.

The arithmetic afterwards is simple. Two principal mobile network operators, plus NT — the state telecom company — and the virtual operators who buy capacity wholesale.

The spectrum on offer in June 2025 was NT’s. All four bands were licensed to the state operator until 3 August 2025, and the auction was held because those licences were expiring. NT was not among the bidders. Both private network operators were. The new licences run for fifteen years.

And here is what the founding Act was worried about

This is the part worth reading the statute for.

The Act that created the regulator in B.E. 2553 (2010) goes to extraordinary lengths to insulate it.

The commission is seven people, and the Act specifies their fields one by one — one expert each in broadcasting, in television, in telecommunications, in engineering, in law, in economics, and in consumer protection or the promotion of people’s rights and liberties.

Candidates are disqualified with precision. A person may not serve if they are or have been a director, manager, executive, adviser, employee, shareholder or partner in any company, partnership or other body carrying on a broadcasting, television or telecommunications business in the year before selection. Holders of political office and party officers are barred. So are members of the Constitutional Court, the Election Commission, the Ombudsman, the anti-corruption commission, the state audit commission and the human rights commission. A serving commissioner may not be a civil servant, a state employee, or a director or adviser of a state enterprise, and may not practise any profession that conflicts with the role.

And look at who does the choosing. The selection committee is drawn from the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court, the Supreme Administrative Court, the National Anti-Corruption Commission, the State Audit Commission, the Ombudsman, and the Governor of the Bank of Thailand. Its members may not themselves apply. The Senate then votes, by secret ballot, and the highest scorer in each field is chosen.

Read that list and ask what risk it is designed against.

Every item on it guards against capture of the regulator. The one-year cooling-in period, the ban on shareholdings, the judicial selection panel, the secret ballot — these are the defences of an institution whose drafters were worried that the referee might be bought, or placed, or leaned on.

Competition is in the Act too — as a job, not a rule

It would be wrong to say the Act ignores competition. It does not.

Section 27(11) gives the regulator the duty to set measures preventing any act that monopolises a market or makes competition unfair in broadcasting, television and telecommunications. Section 49 requires its five-year master plans to set out how free and fair competition will be developed and promoted. Section 76 requires its annual report to the Cabinet and Parliament to describe the state of competition in each market. And section 41 requires spectrum to be licensed by auction — with exceptions in section 42 for spectrum that is plentiful or set aside for public service, state security or non-profit use — under criteria, methods and conditions the regulator itself announces.

Now compare the drafting, because the comparison is the finding.

The referee’s protections are written into the statute itself, in operative detail: seven named fields, fourteen disqualifications, a one-year cooling-in period, a seven-member panel drawn from the courts and the audit bodies, a secret ballot. None of it is left to the regulator. That is the point of it.

The market’s protections are handed to the referee as duties. Set measures. Write plans. Report. Run an auction. What the measures are, how the auction is designed, whether there are caps or set-asides — the Act leaves all of it to the body it has so carefully insulated.

That is a coherent design. An independent regulator is supposed to be trusted with exactly those judgements. But it means the statute is at its most specific where the risk is to the referee and at its most general where the risk is to the game. The Act sets no structural test — no minimum number of operators, no threshold that triggers anything — so when the market went from three private operators to two in 2023, nothing in the Act changed.

Why that matters more than it looks

A regulator’s independence is a means, not an end. It exists so that the regulator can hold a market to account. But a great deal of what a telecoms regulator does only works if the market has competitors in it.

An auction needs rival bidders. Benchmarking one operator’s prices against another’s needs genuinely rival others. The threat of switching, which is what actually disciplines a consumer market, needs somewhere to switch to.

So the independence architecture and the competition architecture are not substitutes, and the Act specifies one of them far more closely than the other. This article is not arguing that the regulator is weak or captured — it has no evidence for either and makes no such claim. It is pointing out where the statute put its detail.

Article 61 The country that outsourced its public space found Thailand repeatedly handing public functions to private operators because the public body could not fund them. This is a different mechanism reaching a similar place: a public asset, allocated by a method that needs competition to work, in a market that has been consolidating.

What would actually change the picture

Not a stricter regulator. A third bidder — or auction rules written for two.

The 2025 rules let a bidder demand every block in a band, which is how two of the bands went whole to one company. Reserve prices set by valuation rather than by precedent, lots configured so that two bidders cannot comfortably split them, spectrum caps, and set-asides for a new entrant are all standard instruments elsewhere — and under section 41, the auction’s criteria, methods and conditions are the regulator’s to write.

That is also this article’s limit, and it is worth stating plainly. It establishes the bidders, the per-band result against the published opening prices, the consolidation dates, the regulator’s own market-share count and the architecture of the Act. It does not establish what a differently designed auction would have raised, and it does not pretend to.

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Common misconceptions

“Thailand has three mobile operators.” The True–dtac amalgamation completed on 1 March 2023. There are two principal mobile network operators, plus the state operator and virtual operators.

“Spectrum is sold.” It is licensed for a term — fifteen years for the bands auctioned in 2025 — and then reverts to be allocated again.

“A low auction total means the regulator undersold it.” It may simply mean nobody had to outbid anybody. In 2025 two of the three bands that sold went at the opening price the rules set.

“The Act says nothing about competition.” It does — sections 27(11), 49 and 76 all address it. What it does not do is specify the protections itself, as it does for the regulator’s independence.

“The regulator is weak.” Nothing here supports that. The Act insulates it unusually thoroughly. The gap identified in this article is about market structure and where the statute put its detail, which is a different thing.

“The mergers were improper.” Both completed lawfully and were examined by the regulator. This article reports their dates and makes no claim about either process.