SC reaffirms ruling, blocking NTC lowering of SMS fee to PHP 0.80

The Supreme Court (SC) has officially denied the National Telecommunications Commission’s (NTC) petition to lower SMS message rates to PHP 0.80 and refund subscribers. It has done this via a Court of Appeals ruling blocking the NTC’s mandate.

The petition was based on a circular released by the NTC in 2011, pushing for a decrease in off-net interconnection rates (network-to-network backend fees) from PHP 0.35 to PHP 0.15. This difference of PHP 0.20 was supposed to make its way to the consumers, thus resulting in the PHP 1.00 to 0.80 drop.

Unfortunately this did not happen, so the NTC released another mandate in 2012 ordering the major telecom players to limit their SMS fees to a maximum of PHP 0.80 per text. This was pushed forward numerous times, including an escalation to the Supreme Court in 2016/17.

The NTC has claimed that the telecoms have not cooperated with the SMS rate reductions as they should have over the years, which means they are obligated to refund the PHP 0.20/text amounts over the years – totalling to a hefty PHP 17+ billion (based on internal calculations) to all subscribers.

Well, the SC has finally closed the book on this by claiming a lack of an explicit directive/requirement in the 2011 circular for consumer SMS rate reductions. Based on the conclusion, it seems that because the off-net interconnection fees were actually decreased as mentioned in the 2011 document, there is nothing more to discuss here.

Mathematically speaking, this reduction only increased revenues for the telcos due to the fact that the PHP 0.20 “discount” failed to make its way to everyday SMS users. What do you think of this ruling?