CAT Telecom

» see cattelecom.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Every private internet provider in Thailand once had to hand a piece of itself to the state telephone company. Reporters Without Borders described the arrangement plainly: by law the Communications Authority of Thailand held a minimum 32 percent share in every privately owned ISP. The stake was not a tax or an investment. It was the price of the license.

CAT was a government agency before it was a company, and it owned the things a country cannot easily duplicate: the international gateways and the submarine cable landings. On 14 August 2003, under the government of Thaksin Shinawatra, the agency's telecom half was incorporated as CAT Telecom Public Company Limited, with the Ministry of Finance holding all of the shares. Corporatization was supposed to be the first step toward a listing.

The listing never happened. The plan was cancelled after the coup of 19 September 2006, and the military government that followed announced instead that CAT would be merged with TOT, the state carrier that ran the domestic network. That merger then took fourteen years to actually arrive, during which CAT kept operating as a company that was neither privatized nor quite a ministry.

What it did in the meantime was collect rent on infrastructure. It ran a CDMA2000 mobile service in partnership with Hutchison across 25 central provinces, plus its own CDMA network in 51 more, and it held a GSM joint venture with TOT called Thai Mobile. Later it hosted other operators' mobile brands on its 850 MHz spectrum, including True's TrueMove H.

~ the case file ~

~ a third of every isp ~

The equity rule explains more about the Thai internet of the 1990s and 2000s than any traffic figure would. Any company that wanted to sell internet access had to route its traffic through CAT's gateway and give CAT a minority holding, so the state sat on both sides of the market at once, as the wholesaler its competitors bought from and as a shareholder in those competitors. The stakes were unwound slowly in the 2000s, with CAT selling its 32 percent of KSC Commercial Internet to True Corporation and its holding in Jasmine Internet back to Jasmine International.

My own broadband came from TTNet, the internet arm of the Turkish incumbent, and most of its competitors were reselling the same copper under their own names. That is a softer version of the same structure, and it is close enough that the Thai rule reads to me as an honest statement of what a lot of national internet markets were actually like.

~ the name on the invoice ~

The merger that the 2006 junta announced was finally approved by the Ministry of Finance on 7 January 2021, when CAT Telecom and TOT were combined into National Telecom Public Company Limited with registered capital of 16 billion baht. Both companies went to the Department of Business Development to register the new entity. English Wikipedia's infobox dates CAT's end to 6 January and its article text to 7 January, and the Thai press reported the seventh.

The merged company did not have an easy first year. Thai coverage four months in described a structure that had not settled and losses approaching 3 billion baht. The gateway and the cables are still there, carrying Thai traffic under a name chosen by a committee, and cattelecom.com now answers with nothing but a server error.

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