19.04.2018

 

At the Consultative Council meeting on 19 April 2018, ANCOM together with the industry debated and adopted the decision on reducing the number porting fees charged by telephony operators. "As the amount of ported numbers has increased significantly, ANCOM deemed it necessary to review the fees that the recipient provider owes to the donor provider for each ported number. We expect this reduction of the porting costs per telephone number to bring about growing numbers of portability users, and the providers’ launching more attractive offers" said Eduard LOVIN, ANCOM Vice-president.

The decision will be sent for publication in the Romanian Official Journal and will enter into force 15 days after its publication.

Wholesale fee for porting a fixed number

The fee for porting geographic numbers, location-independent numbers and non-geographic numbers, other than those intended for the provision of mobile electronic communications services was set at EUR 4.64 per ported number, down from EUR 7.8.

The level of this fee was determined based on benchmarking, as the average of the wholesale number porting fees applied in Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Latvia, Macedonia, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain and Turkey, weighted by the number of active fixed telephony lines as of 1 July 2017.

The wholesale tariff for mobile numbers

The tariff for porting non-geographic numbers for the provision of mobile electronic communications services was set at EUR 2.13 per ported number, down from EUR 5.6.

The level of this tariff was determined based on benchmarking as the average of the wholesale number tariffs charged in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Cyprus, France, Greece, Ireland, Latvia, Macedonia, Malta, Portugal, Serbia, Slovakia and Turkey, weighted by the number of active SIM cards as of 1 July 2017.

Methodology for calculating wholesale charges

ANCOM has set the maximum level of porting fees by means of the benchmarking method, based on information collected from 31 of the 37 member states in the Independent Regulators Group (IRG).

Following the public consultation process, ANCOM considered it relevant that the maximum level of the porting fees be set as a weighted average in relation to the number of active fixed telephone lines, for porting fixed numbers, respectively to the number of active SIM cards number, for porting mobile numbers, as of 1 July 2017, considering that the number of users is a factor with a higher specific relevance than the country's population, as initially proposed by ANCOM in the public consultation.

The previous fees had been set by ANCOM in 2010, also based on benchmarking.

Background info

The wholesale fee for porting telephone numbers is intended to cover the donor provider's costs incurred in porting the number to the recipient provider. The porting costs are generated by technical activities (porting the respective number), operational and administrative ones, as well as by updating the local databases used and the centralized database.

ANCOM set the fees currently in force in 2010, when approximately 250,000 telephone numbers had been ported.

Almost 4.5 million numbers have been transferred between networks from the launch of portability to end-2017. 3.7 million of these are mobile telephony numbers and 700 thousand are fixed telephony numbers.