THE Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) plans to select the “third player” in the telecommunications industry before President Rodrigo R. Duterte delivers his next State of the Nation Address (SONA) in late July.

Acting DICT Secretary Eliseo M. Rio, Jr. said the department has a “self-imposed timeline” of selecting the industry’s new entrant before the SONA, which the President must deliver to Congress on the last Monday of July.

“The self-imposed timeline is before the SONA,” Mr. Rio told reporters on the sidelines of the Digital Disruption forum organized by the European Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines on April 5.

He also said the DICT may release the second draft of the terms of reference (TOR) by the end of the month and the final version by the second week of May.

Mr. Rio said the department has been working on the TOR with consultants, including representatives of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). The second draft was scheduled to be released around the end of March, but Mr. Rio said there were legal issues stemming from a Supreme Court ruling which bar the awarding of frequency to a consortium.

A possible remedy is for the winning consortium to select a lead company to whom the DICT will award frequency.

“There was also a problem with the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission)… concerning legal issues with consortiums.”

“We did some research on a Supreme Court decision, and concluded we could not award frequency to a consortium. It must be (to) a lead telco … so what is likely to happen is, the consortium must elect a lead telco to be given the award of frequencies,” Mr. Rio said.

Mr. Rio said that in the new draft TOR, the department is looking at including financial requirements as selection criteria. These will be weighted against the committed speed and coverage.

The first draft TOR, published in February, included the financial requirement of a net worth of at least P10 billion. The government initially sought to select a candidate submitting the highest financial commitment over five years, but after a public consultation and concerns expressed by interested companies, the DICT said it would be shifting its focus to requiring wide coverage and high speed.

“The performance, we will measure, and of course, their committed financial investment because they might say that, this is our speed, faster than Singapore. But it has to backed up by the money that they will invest,” Mr. Rio said.

A public consultation is to be scheduled after the publication of the second draft TOR. — Patrizia Paola C. Marcelo

This article was originally published in Business World on April 5, 2018