The head of Ursec, Mercedes Aramendía, told the Presidential Communication that according to the report for the first half of the year, number portability provided direct and indirect benefits for those who wanted to migrate companies without losing their telephone number. She assured that traffic continues to increase, users access more services at lower prices and the three provider companies have undergone modifications.
The president of the Communications Services Regulatory Unit (Ursec) considered that the measure implied growth and dynamism for the market, and reported that they authorized 42,000 applications. She also pointed out that there was a high number of rejections for various reasons and that the number of requests for portability did not exceed 1% of the total market average, the figure expected at the beginning of the process.
In relation to the benefits, Aramendía highlighted the trend towards postpaid contracts, when before they were prepaid, which can be seen in the fact that the prices of the contracts were reduced by 15%, data traffic increased by 18% and the performance of gigabytes was tripled and the price was reduced by 75%.
The hierarch recalled that number portability is a right of mobile phone users, which allows them to change operators and keep the number. He mentioned that the process began in July 2020, with the work of the committee formed to deal with this issue, which was later approved in the law of urgent consideration.
The aforementioned area was made up of the three mobile phone operators, the Agency for Electronic Government and the Information and Knowledge Society (Agesic), the National Directorate of Telecommunications (Dinatel) and Ursec.
In January 2021, the Executive Power approved the number portability regulation and, based on it, a call was made and the Cleartech Cietel consortium was hired as database administrator, so that the process could be carried out in the best way. Cietel is a national company that provides various technical services, and Cleartech, portability solutions in Brazil and Canada.