Over 1 million people have changed their mobile or fixed telephony providers since 2008

Over 1 million people have changed their mobile or fixed telephony provider since 2008

Newsroom 11/10/2013 | 10:47

Since October 25, 2008 when portability came into force, 759,273 mobile telephony customers and 366,686 fixed telephony customers have changed their telephony provider without giving up their phone number.

Between January- October 2013, 192,683 users have changed the network, proving that interest for portability is increasing. By comparison, throughout the entire 2012, there were 255,881 people who did this.

“Five years since ANCOM launched this service, 5 percent of telephony users have opted for changing their provider and keeping their number. This ratio is not great but what matters is the freedom that this service offers, the negotiation leverage that portability has brought users in relation to operators and the fact that providers have to make more efforts to keep their clients- more competitive offers, investments in technology, quality and innovating services,” said Catalin Marinescu, president of telecom watchdog ANCOM.

From the total number of 1,125,959 users who changed the telephony provider, 67 percent were mobile telephony users.

Vodafone received in its network 257,958 new clients, Orange received 249,922, Cosmote received 241,483, RCS & RDS received 7,791, Romtelecom received 1,400 and Telemobil received 719 new users.

In the case of fixed telephony, 34 providers share among them the 366,686 numbers ported so far.

Most of these new clients were received by RCS & RDS, which received 101,822 new clients, while 89,503 chose UPC, 72,374 chose Orange, 68,428 chose Vodafone and 15,161 chose Romtelecom.