Within the two tender procedures launched in March, ANCOM received five offers: two offers (from Infoclick and Mediasat) for the designation of the universal service provider that will make publicly available a directory enquiry service and three offers (from Infoclick, Mediasat and Borg Design) for the designation of the universal service provider that will make available an on-line subscriber directory. Both services will include information on the telephone numbers and the personal data of all the publicly available telephone services.
In the following period, a commission of ANCOM will analyse the submitted offers and will designate the winner by 30 May 2009, so that the services could be provided from 31 October 2009. The directory enquiry service and the subscriber directory are both services within the scope of the universal service whose purpose is to enable each user to have access to certain information on the subscribers of the publicly available electronic communications providers. All the 44 companies that currently allot numbering resources to the end-users will make available for the designated universal service providers the data of their users who agreed to make public their contact data.
“The telephony companies have already begun the campaign in order to obtain the agreement of their subscribers to be included in the universal telephone book. All subscribers will be able to decide whether they wish or not to make public their contact data”, Catalin Marinescu, the President of ANCOM, stated.
The universal service providers designated following the tender will have the obligation to create and manage complete databases, which should include the fax and telephone numbers, as well as certain identification data of all the subscribers to publicly available telephone services in Romania, including prepay card users.
In order to designate the provider that will make available the subscriber directory, ANCOM will consider criteria such as: the amount the requester undertakes to bear out of the total costs generated by retrieving the data for creating and updating the database from the operators, previous experience in making available subscriber directories to the end-users, the provision of a printed subscriber directory, the maximum number of simultaneous users of the on-line subscriber directory, the provision of a subscriber directory on the subscribers of telephony operators in other countries, the provision of a subscriber directory in a foreign language, the provision of a directory enquiry service via SMS and the provision of a voice directory enquiry service.
Furthermore, the offers for the directory enquiry service will be assessed based on criteria such as: the amount the requester undertakes to bear out of the total costs generated by retrieving from the operators the data for creating and updating the complete database, the tariff of the interconnection service for call termination in view of ensuring access to the subscriber directory service, previous experience in making available subscriber directory services to the end-users, direct connection to a communicated number, the provision of a subscriber directory in a foreign language, the making available of three or more telephone numbers per call, the provision of the directory enquiry service via SMS, the provision of a subscriber directory in electronic format.