Are you forced to climb the highest mountain to call your mom from the Carpathians? Does your mobile operator charge from your balance without prior notice? Are you not happy with the phone call quality anymore? Sometimes there are situations when we want to change the operator, but save the phone number.
This service is known as MNP (Mobile number portability), and in Ukraine, it is envisaged by the amendments to the Law “On Telecommunications” adopted on July 1, 2010. The Law provided for 6 months to adopt the necessary regulatory acts by executive authorities. Only in 2013, the National Commission for the State Regulation of Communications and Informatization (NCCIR) approved the “Regulation on mobile number portability services” and selected the Central Database Administrator for personal numbers and transferred subscriber numbers. However, due to non-transparent corruption schemes, one of the mobile operators appealed this Regulation to the court.
In 2015, the NCCIR developed a new procedure to provide subscriber number portability services and assigned the functions of the central MNP database administrator to the state enterprise “Ukrainian State Center of Radio Frequencies” (UCRF). The UCRF announced a tender for the purchase of number portability services that resulted in court proceedings and, eventually ended with a final settlement agreement between tender participants in June 2018. Finally, the NCCIR promises to implement the MNP on May 1, 2019. Subscribers will be able to change operators without losing their phone numbers. We hope that this time there will be no additional delays, because in addition to subscribers, European partners also expect that this problem will be solved in accordance with the Directive No.2002/22/EC.