In the first two months since the launch of number portability, almost 25,000 porting requests have been submitted – over 21,000 for mobile numbers and over 3,000 for fixed numbers.
Speaking of fixed telephony, 1,694 numbers have been ported so far, by the following operators: Atlas Telecom – 1, Dial Telecom – 26, Euroweb – 5, GTS – 7, RCS&RDS – 403, Romtelecom – 210, Telemobil – 62, UPC – 425, Vodafone – 555.
Regarding mobile telephony, approximately 14,000 numbers have been ported by: Cosmote – 5,960, Orange – 4,167, RCS&RDS – 38, Telemobil – 41, Vodafone – 3,778.
”As anticipated, mobile numbers are most ported. The number of requests, as well as the number of ported numbers, meet our estimates. So far, an operator was allowed to port no more than 300 numbers a day. Today, we will start extending this ceiling, gradually, as required by the number of porting requests”, the ANC President, Mr. Liviu Nistoran, declared.
The ANC President emphasized that the porting procedure is a complex one. The administrative processes involved by the implementation of number portability consist of several stages, each of which can raise various technical problems. Sometimes, certain technical problems may block an activated porting process, therefore the porting must be resumed from the initial stage, by re-entering the porting request into the database. The President highlighted that the Authority permanently monitors the porting processes by means of the central database and takes steps, based on regular analyses, in order to identify and solve the occurring problems and to prevent similar occurrences. ”Thus, we managed to keep down the number of incidents and to rapidly remove the causes of disruption from the porting processes”, Mr. Liviu Nistoran added.
Number portability is a service that offers the telephony subscribers the possibility to keep their telephone numbers when they switch providers. Portability is available for fixed or mobile telephony numbers, as well as for special numbers such as 0800- or 0900- numbers, but only within the same category (fixed-to-fixed or mobile-to-mobile). This service has been launched in Romania on 21 October 2008.