Bulgaria's Mtel Calls on Rivals to Adopt One-Stop-Shop Number Portability

The agreement allows customers to change their mobile operator with just one visit at the office of the company to which they want to subscribe. Photo by BGNES

Bulgaria's first and biggest mobile operator Mtel, which signed earlier this week an agreement to implement the wireless number portability service at one-stop-shop, has urged its rivals to follow suit.

The agreements, which aim to ease the portability of fixed and mobile number by introducing the one-stop-shop service, have not yet been signed by Globul and the alternative telecoms.

Mtel and the country's third-biggest operator Vivacom signed an agreement to implement the wireless number portability service at one-stop-shop for fixed numbers a few days ago. The two operators have also an agreement for mobile numbers portability.

Under the agreement the clients will be allowed to switch to another operator with just one visit at the office of the company to which they want to subscribe.

The service is scheduled to come into force on August 6.

A delay in the introduction of the service will not only hurt the client's rights, but incur huge fines for all operators, who had to put their signatures under the procedure until May 10.

The news comes days after the Bulgarian communications regulator threatened mobile operators with sanctions for refusing to implement the service.

The regulatory body, the Communications Regulation Commission, said there is a sharp increase in complaints received from clients of the three mobile operators in the country – Mtel, Globul and Vivacom.

According to insiders the fight for subscribers became particularly acrimonious after the Communications Regulation Commission announced plans to launch "one-stop-shop" portability service.

Since the introduction of the service at the beginning of 2009 by the end of the year no more than 0,5% of the mobile operators clients, 55 830 subscribers, have availed themselves of it, data of the regulatory body shows.

The wireless number portability came into effect after Bulgaria's three mobile operators signed a framework agreement to make the service available between networks.

Bulgaria had to implement the service as soon as it joined the EU on January 1, 2007 but just ten days later the biggest mobile operator Mtel refused to join the agreement already signed by the other two wireless carriers.

The saga went on for the entire year, with the telecoms regulator intervening in August to speed up proceedings, but to no avail, giving the European Commission reason to start infringement procedures against Bulgaria.

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