Thai mobile operators to invest 300M baht each in emergency broadcast system

The Ministry of Digital Economy and Society (DES) is set to submit a plan to develop a cell broadcast emergency warning system to the cabinet next month, with the aim of getting the system off the ground this year to deal with incidents of public disorder and disasters.

Each of the major mobile operators may have to spend 300 million baht to establish their own cell broadcast centre to serve the system, while the ministry may need to invest around 400 million baht to set up its own cell broadcast entity (CBE), according to minister Prasert Jantararuangthong.

He said on Monday the major mobile phone operators would each need to install the cell broadcast system and the process is expected to take more than six months.

Mr Prasert said the ministry would have to seek approval via a cabinet resolution for the creation of the entire cell broadcast ecosystem. The 400-million-baht budget it requires for the establishment of the CBE may be come from the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission fund.

He added that the government would have to clarify whether an agency under the DES Ministry or the Interior Ministry’s Disaster Mitigation Centre would act as the sole state command centre for the cell broadcast system.

“The cell broadcast system is targeted to be implemented officially this year.”

Basically, there are two-tiers of the system to handle public disorder or disasters.

The first is a location-based service (LBS) that major operators have already had for years. Each operator is able to send short messages to all mobile phones using their network system in specific areas. The second system is the cell broadcast system.

Mr Prasert said the development of the cell broadcast emergency warning system is one of the ministry’s seven core policies this year.

Others include its cloud first policy involving its wooing of local and foreign cloud operators to invest in Thailand, aiming to turn Thailand into Southeast Asian hub. The policy also aims to provide cloud services to develop public services by no less than 220 departments with 75,000 virtual machines (VMs) capacity.

Currently, state enterprise National Telecom provides around 40,000 VMs to serve state units and the capacity is expected to increase to 100,000 VMs.

Another policy is the continued development of artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure through an AI service integration platform on Government Data and Cloud Centre and the development of Thai Large Language Model as an AI infrastructure for the Thai language.

Moreover, it will promote the “one district, one IT man” scheme, covering 878 districts.

Mr Prasert added that the ministry will continue to create digital manpower and woo foreign digital manpower via the Global Digital Talent Visa programme.

The sixth policy is it will continue to curb cybercrime by deploying AI to support its existing Anti Online Scam Operation Center in detecting, analysing and suppressing mule accounts.

The seventh policy it will continue to push is improving Thailand’s global digital competitiveness ranking. Bangkok Post