Communications authority: Cost of porting phone numbers will be up to 2.6 times lower

Anca Alexe 20/04/2018 | 09:52

The tariffs charged by operators for porting landline numbers are dropping from EUR 7.8 to EUR 4.64 per number, and for mobile numbers the tariff is going from EUR 5.6 to EUR 2.13 per number, according to a decision by the National Authority for Administration and Regulation of Communications (ANCOM).

ANCOM and industry players debated and adopted the decision regarding the decrease of operators’ tariffs for switching phone numbers to other networks.

Eduard Lovin, vice president of ANCOM, said: “Considering the fact that the number of ported numbers has significantly grown, ANCOM saw it necessary to revise the tariffs owed by the accepting supplier to the donating supplier for each ported number. We expect that the reduction of these costs will be seen both in an increase of the number of users who choose to switch networks, as well as in suppliers’ offers”.

According to ANCOM, the new tariff levels were determined by a benchmark comparison of the average porting tariffs in Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Latvia, Macedonia, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain and Turkey, and also taking into account the number of active phone lines on July 1, 2017.

The previous tariffs had been set by ANCOM in 2010, also based on a benchmark comparison.

In total, since the launch of portability until the end of 2017, almost 4.5 million phone numbers were transferred between network, of which 3.7 million were mobile numbers.