Nearly 16,000 Romanians switched their telephony network operator in 2008

Approximately 25 thousand users applied for portability service, with 21 thousand for mobile number portability versus 3,000 applications for local number portability.

As for landline telephony, roughly 1,694 telephone numbers were ported: Atlas Telecom – 1, Dial Telecom – 26, Euroweb – 5, GTS – 7, RCS&RDS – 403, Romtelecom -210, Telemobil – 62, UPC – 425, and Vodafone – 555.

In case of mobile network operators, some 14,000 mobile phone users have taken the opportunity to change mobile carriers: Cosmote – 5,960, Orange – 4,167, RCS&RDS – 38, Telemobil – 41 and Vodafone – 3,778.

“As we expected, most of the ported telephone numbers are in mobile telecommunication segment. Number of requests, as well as executed ported numbers meets our expectations. Until now, the top level of completed number porting requests on a day-by-day basis permitted for each operator was 300. As of today, we plan on progressively increase the limit, as much as it is necessary, given the number of incoming porting requests,” said Liviu Nistoran (photo), chairman of ANC.

Number portability is a service designed for all phone users that enables subscribers to retain their telephone numbers while changing the network operator. All fixed-line, mobile and special telephone numbers are portable. The portability is available only between numbers of similar telephony array (landline-landline and mobile-mobile). The service has been introduced in Romania on October 21, 2008.