National Regulatory Agency for Electronic Communications and Information Technology of the Republic of Moldova

Telephone numbers are ported by providers of public telephone services following an application submitted by the subscriber, within maximum five working days, except the cases when the subscriber requests a longer term. This is a provision of the Regulations on Number portability, approved by Decision no. 34 (doc. in state language) of 01.12.2011 of ANRCETI Administrative Board. The regulations entered in force on January 20, 2012 – the date of its publication in the Official Gazette of the Republic of Moldova.

Number portability is a service intended for telephone users allowing them to keep their telephone numbers when switching to other telephone service providers. This service is planned to be launched in 2012 - 2013, according to the Program for Number Portability Implementation in 2012 - 2013, a document developed by ANRCETI and approved by Order of the Ministry of Information Technology and Communications of 30.06.2011. According to the Program, the number portability in mobile networks is to be implemented before the end of 2012, in fixed networks - in 2013.

The Regulations sets forth the general principles for the implementation of numbers portability, the key-elements of the technical and commercial conditions for this process, the rules for number porting and call routing, the obligations of the providers involved in the porting process, the status of the centralized data base, the manner of selecting an administrator for the data base.

This normative document places the providers of public telephone services holding licenses for the use of numbering resources under the obligation to ensure number portability in their own networks, so that any number from their own networks can be ported to any eligible network of another provider, and vice versa. These providers are liable to ensure the number portability in fixed and mobile networks, regardless of the technology used (PSTN, ISDN, IP, CDMA, GSM, CDMA 2000, UMTS etc.), type of service provided (voice, fax, data transmission, etc), manner of payment (postpaid, prepaid etc.), or whether the subscriber has or does not have a signed written contract with the given provider.

According to the Regulations, where a user renounces the telephone services offered by one provider (donor provider) in favor of another (acceptor provider), the user will not be charged by the donor provider for the porting, the direct costs of this service being incurred by the provider acceptor who has the right to decide whether to transfer the costs incurred to the user (totally or partially). The condition imposed by the Agency is the following: where the acceptor provider decides to charge the user, the tariffs must be reasonable and transparent.

In order to correctly inform the subscribers about the number porting process, the providers are liable to make publicly available, free of charge, detailed and updated information about this service on their Internet pages, by means of customer relation services and by providing this information to subscribers upon request.

The Regulations provide for the porting of geographic numbers from ranges „2”, „3” and „5”, numbers independent of location from range „3” and non-geographic numbers from ranges „6”, „7”, „8” and „9” assigned from the National Numbering Plan. The document specifies that numbers will not be ported from fixed to mobile networks and vice versa.

The Regulations was subject to public consultations, discussed during several working sessions organized by ANRCETI, attended by telephone network/service providers and subsequently reviewed and endorsed by the Working Group of the State Commission for regulation of entrepreneurial activity.

20 ianuarie 2012