ANCOM has put forward a draft decision Wednesday aimed to speed up mobile number porting. The authority reduced to three from ten days the interval in which telephony operators must carry out number porting procedures.
After porting requests are validated, the number will be activated in at most one workday.
The regulator also reduced the interval in which mobile services may be interrupted due to the porting process from five hours to four hours (for hard-line phone numbers) and from four to three hours (for mobile numbers).
Clients may refuse provisional phone numbers to be used until numbers are ported, reads the draft act.
Moreover, if clients accept a provisional number and operators fail to complete the porting process, subscribers will have the right to choose whether to continue the contract with the phone service provider.
The new document also fights abusive number porting by introducing new obligations to be observed by telephony providers.
Phone number portability enables users to keep their phone numbers when they choose another mobile network. The service has been available in Romania since October 2008.
From October 2008 until December 31, 2011, 677,395 phone numbers were ported, of which 456,334 mobile numbers and 221,061 hard-line phone numbers.
About 260,256 numbers were ported in 2011, up 17% on the year.
Since 2008, ANCOM has received 593 complaints regarding number porting problems.