The Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission on Monday approved the directives on Mobile Number Portability to allow subscribers switching their operators without changing their numbers.
The BTRC will issue a directive to the mobile companies soon, said commission officials.
The telecom regulator recently designed the key features of the MNP service with a provision implementation deadline of six months and test-run period of three months for the operators, they said.
The operators will have 72 hours to complete the transfer after any subscriber applied to avail such service, they said.
The subscribers will be charged Tk 50 as transfer fee.
They said after the introduction of the MNP the number signature, for example 0155 serial for state-run Teletalk, of the mobile companies will not be valid.
When a subscriber will switch from one operator to other, the recipient operator will be liable for maintaining the records of the number although it will have signature of another operator.
BTRC officials also said the commission designed the MNP directive with a system of third party arrangement to maintain the transfer among the mobile companies.
The MNP will be operated under a central system with new software which will be managed by a third-party company.
The posts and telecommunications ministry, however, suggested the BTRC to use a consortium model of the mobile companies to introduce the MNP service.
The BTRC officials said the commission finally approved he consortium model for the MNP implementation as per the ministry suggestion.
They, however, said the MNP was not successfully implemented in the countries which used consortium model for such service operation as the leading mobile companies often dominate the consortium.
They said the large subscriber base mobile companies often lose some of their users after the MNP implementation.
Grameenphone chief executive officer Vivek Sood recently said that GP was not favourable with the move of introducing the MNP at this moment.
‘As the largest company we might face a setback but we will follow the regulators directive in this regard,’ he said in reply to a question while presenting the Q1 financial report to the media recently.
-with New Age input
