NTC pushes 6-second billing scheme for mobile phones

THE NATIONAL Telecommunications Commission (NTC) is requesting the Office of the Solicitor General to help resolve a five-year-old legal impasse on a policy that would require mobile phone companies to bill customers on a six-second pulse cycle.

An NTC circular issued in 2000 directed phone companies to bill by the six-second pulse instead of rounding off charges to the higher minute. But the major players obtained an injunction from the Quezon City Regional Trial Court.

The circular also ordered the telecom firms to register the SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) cards of prepaid customers to help regulate the industry by preventing text scams and discouraging phone theft. The billing circular never got implemented.

"We have asked the OSG to help us expedite and find a favorable resolution to this billing circular. It would be to the interest of the consumers," NTC chairman Ronald Solis said.

Solis said the regulator would immediately implement the billing circular once the court lifts the restraining order.

The TRO issued by the Quezon City court was questioned by the NTC before the Court of Appeals. It was brought to the Supreme Court, which remanded the case to the Quezon City court in 2003.

Isabela Representative Rodolfo Albano said the billing circular should be resolved immediately.

"It has been four years since that injunction. There should be moves to lift that because the billing circular would be good for consumers," Albano said.

The shift to a six-second pulse scheme would make it cheaper for consumers to make calls. The billing measure was originally meant to address a pervasive problem with dropped calls starting in the late 1990s.

Mobile companies said they have solved the problem of dropped calls or those that were prematurely terminated by the network but were still charged to subscribers.

Albano said the major players should refund consumers or at least pay more taxes to the government out of the billions in pesos they were making from network inefficiency.

He claimed that phone giants that have been earning billions each year must be ordered to pay back consumers or at least the government the amount they had overcharged in the past due to their poor network service.

Albano said he would initiate moves in Congress to revive plans of the NTC to revise the billing structure of telephone companies.

Representative. Danilo Suarez, vice chair of the House ways and means committee, earlier estimated that mobile phone operators make between seven billion and 10 billion pesos each year from dropped calls.

Suarez authored a bill calling for the imposition of a franchise tax on telecom firms for the use of the airwaves and also for poor service.

Suarez said telecom firms must adopt the six-second billing cycle or to start billing a call only after the first minute to ensure that subscribers were not paying more than what they should for a call that may be cut within a one-minute billing period.

Officials of Smart Communications and Globe Telecom, the country's two largest mobile phone firms, have said they now offer seamless connections and that their systems can now distinguish between a network drop and those calls deliberately terminated by subscribers.

Globe has almost 4,000 cellular sites nationwide while Smart has about 5,000 all over the country. Third player Sun Cellular has about 1,300 cellular sites and said it would expand its network to about 2,000 this year so it could accommodate six million custome