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ANCOM Agreed with the Industry the Conditions for the Reduction of the Porting Term
04.04.2012
During today’s meeting of the Consultative Council, ANCOM has finalised the debate on the decision amending the technical and commercial conditions related to telephone number porting. Thus, according to the new decision, the ported number will become active in the new network in maximum one working day, in line with the European rules, and the maximum duration of the porting-related administrative procedures is reduced from 10 to 3 working days.
The decision reduces the timelines in which the providers have the obligation to carry out the specific activities associated to the various stages of the porting process. In this sense, the term in which the donor provider is to answer a porting request is reduced from 4 working days to one. This reduction will allow for the porting to be done more rapidly, including in cases where the donor provider identifies faults at the filling in of the request which trigger the need to submit the respective request again.
Once the porting request validated, the telephone number of the subscriber requesting the porting will be activated within one working day at a maximum. From the day this decision becomes effective, the potential maximum duration of service interruption in the course of the porting process will drop to 4 hours instead of 5 (in the case of the fixed telephone numbers) and 3 hours instead of 4 (in the case of the mobile telephone numbers). In practice, the service is interrupted for less time, the average of the last quarter being of approx. 90 minutes for fixed telephone numbers and 40 minutes for mobile telephone numbers.
At the same time, the ANCOM decision introduces a series of provisions referring to the porting by means of a temporary number. Thus, the decision envisages the subscribers’ practical possibility to be ported without the allocation by the acceptor provider of a temporary telephone number to be used until the porting is achieved. Moreover, where the subscribers decide to accept a temporary number, the ANCOM decision ensures those subscribers’ protection, by expressly stipulating the right to really choose between continuing or ending their contractual relation with the acceptor provider, in case the porting process is not duly finalised, and, respectively, to be informed accordingly on the consequences of their choice. As well, the decision imposes on the providers of electronic communications services additional obligations meant to prevent abusive porting and the obligation to make available to the users, including in printed form, information concerning the porting procedures, if they request it.
Furthermore, the ANCOM decision imposes the obligation of warning the end-users, by means of the distinctive tone, on the fact that they have called a ported number, in all cases when the tariff charged might exceed the tariff they would have legitimately expected. The scope of the cases when the distinctive tone will be ensured is thus extended, as currently the providers have the obligation to warn the users only on the fact that they called a number ported from their own electronic communications networks.
The provisions of this decision will enter into force within 4 months from its publication date in the Official Journal.
Current status of the ported numbers
745,662 numbers were ported until 31 March 2012 since the portability service was introduced at end-2008. Out of these, 507,867 were mobile telephone numbers, 224,600 were fixed telephone geographic numbers and 13,195 were location-independent numbers (for fixed telephony).
The largest amount of mobile telephone numbers were ported into the networks of the following mobile telephony providers: Vodafone (176,537), Cosmote (169,492), Orange (156,387), RCS&RDS (4,728) and Telemobil (719). As for the fixed telephony providers, most numbers were ported into the networks of UPC (67,555), RCS&RDS (61,257), Orange (45,501), Vodafone (40,862) and Romtelecom (11,614).
The average monthly amount of ported numbers rose from 7,833 in 2008 to 15,019 in 2009, 18,434 in 2010, and reached 21,688 in 2011. The largest amount of ported numbers in a month was registered in December 2011, i.e. 34,696.
In the case of mobile telephony, the statistical data also show that postpaid users port their numbers more frequently than the prepaid users. Thus, approx. 75% of the total mobile telephony users who ported their numbers in 2011 were postpaid users and about 25% were prepaid users.
