AFTER nearly two years of serving as commissioner of the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC), Ruel Canobas has decided to leave the agency.

According to sources, Canobas—the sixth NTC commissioner for the present administration—wants to spend more of his time as deputy secretary-general for the administration’s Lakas-Kampi party. He had long been contemplating to leave the agency, but was recently caught up in a Senate probe on issues such as vanishing load, spam messages and other consumer-related complaints.

“He was thinking of resigning even before the NTC was in hot water. He had to deal and settle the issues first,” said a source.

Canobas failed to respond to phone calls and text messages.

Another source said the NTC chief is currently on-leave and has appointed deputy commissioner Douglas Michael Mallillin as officer in charge. Canobas, who assumed post in August 2007, reportedly submitted his resignation letter to President Arroyo but the latter was unable to act on it as she had to leave the country to meet with US President Barack Obama.

There was another industry source who said President Arroyo told Canobas to defer his decision until after she has delivered her State of the Nation Address. “But the President had to go to the US and so Canobas’s resignation  has yet to be acted upon. So, Canobas is now on-leave and awaits the return of the President by next week,” the source said.

The sources said Gamaliel Cordoba, a director of the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp., may be appointed to replace Canobas. “It’s already a done deal. [Canobas] will step down and be replaced by Cordoba,” said the courses.

Like Canobas, Cordoba worked in Malacañang as appointments secretary and undersecretary at the Office of the President. As a former member of the Siguion Reyna, Montecillo and Ongsiako Law Office, Cordoba’s fields of expertise are in taxation and corporate law. He started working as legal assistant in several courts before he received his law degree from  Ateneo de Manila University in 1996. He was also a legal assistant at the Office of Quezon City Regional Trial Court Judge Maximiano Asuncion in 1994 and at the Office of Justice Godardo Jacinto, Court of Appeals of the Philippines, in 1995.

Industry players said they already knew about Canobas’s resignation. They, however, are concerned about pending applications filed before the NTC. “It’s another learning process for the new NTC commissioner. This means that it will take longer for all applications to be acted upon,” said an official of one of the carriers.

Aside from pending applications, it is expected that the issuance of new policy rules will also be put on hold.

These include the formulation of guidelines on the provision of contents, information, applications and electronic games; guidelines on promotions; and guidelines on access charge between mobile network service providers and content providers.

Other plans include the issuance of regulations for digital television broadcast service; the frequency migration plan for digital television; and the development of digital infrastructure in unserved and undeserved areas to meet the targets of the medium-term Philippine development plan.

There are also ongoing studies on cable TV which included the drafting of circular on the deployment of addressable system in cable TV operations and the implementation of the ‘must carry’ provision. The Commission also ordered the preparation of frequency allocation plan for the transfer of affected authorized users within 470-512 Megahertz which will be reallocated for digital terrestrial TV service.

So far, the NTC had addressed interconnection issues, content provision and consumer protection through the issuance of memorandum circulars.

These include the rules on mandatory interconnection of cable landing stations which opened the backhaul service to other suppliers and mandated the interconnection of backhaul networks to all cable landing stations; approval of the rules and regulations of reference access offer, which mandates the basic terms and conditions for access agreements between telcos; the registration of content providers, the setting of service performance standards for cellular mobile telephone service (CMTS) which set the grade of service to four lost calls for every 100 call attempts and the drop call rate to two dropped calls for every 100 calls; the guidelines on prepaid cards which set the validity period per amount purchased; the withdrawal of the six seconds per pulse unit of billing for CMTS; additional rules and regulation on  broadcast messaging service which addressed the issue on spam; and reduction of voice call unit of billing to six second per pulse instead of one minute pulse.