Takorn Tantasith, NBTC secretary-general, said the office would propose that mobile-phone operators must use 85-90 per cent of their numbers before they can apply for additional numbers. This is to force operators to have a better management plan for existing numbers.

Under the present regulations, they can apply for additional numbers after using up 70 per cent of the ones already allocated.

The NBTC has assigned 217 million numbers to telecom companies, of which only 102 million are being used and 20 million are non-active. There are 39 million numbers under expired TOT and CAT Telecom concessions that are to be returned to the NBTC.

The NBTC still has 42.87 million numbers in its pocket.

Late last month True Move H Universal Communication (TUC) of True Corp obtained an additional 2.8 million numbers from the NBTC, while Advanced Wireless Network (AWN) of Advanced Info Service (AIS) received an additional 1.6 million numbers in January.

As of February AIS had 84.51 million numbers, of which 46.33 million belonged to AWN and the rest to AIS.

As of the same period, Total Access Communication had 59.77 million numbers, of which 21.76 million belonged to its subsidiary DTAC TriNet Network, and DTAC itself had the rest.

True had 60.80 million numbers, of which TUC got 14.03 million, TrueMove 23.09 million and another subsidiary, Real Move, 3.68 million. CAT had 23.29 million numbers, while TOT had 7.72 million.