Numbering, Portability and Pre-Selection

Amendment to the Portability Regulation

Regulation no. 58/2005 of 18 August (Portability Regulation) which establishes the principles and rules governing portability on the public telephone networks and which is binding upon all companies with portability obligations, was published on 18 August 2005. Until then, and as of 28 June 2001 for fixed networks and January 2002 for mobile networks, the Specifications for Portability applied - which overall constitutes a total of seven years experience with the adopted portability solution.

However, as a result of the development seen in the markets for electronic communications services and the corresponding growth in the number of users signing up to this type of service, there is a demand for efficiency and speed in the process of switching operator with subscriber number portability, and the European Commission has also called for a significant reduction in the time that users have to wait for portability.

Accordingly, almost three years after the Portability Regulation came into force, the practice of companies subject to it has demonstrated the need to make some changes to the original version, with respect to the principles and rules to be observed.

Therefore, on 15 October 2008, ICP-ANACOM adopted the draft amendment to the Portability Regulation, which was subsequently made subject to the regulatory procedure laid down in article 11 of the Statutes of ICP-ANACOM and to public consultation.

With the introduced amendments, emphasis is given to the responsibility of the receiving provider with regard to the entire process, rules are established providing for efficiency between providers and there is greater subscriber protection. In this regard provision has been made for the payment of monetary compensation in cases of non-compliance or negligence, both between providers, and for the subscriber. In addition, deadlines were established for the activation of portability for the subscriber.

Furthermore, a solution was defined that will enable the portability of numbers of subscribers and former subscribers of companies which stop providing the service, for whom this functionality must also be ensured.

Conditions associated with the rights to use numbers transferred to Sonaecom

By determination of 29 December 2008, ANACOM approved, following the respective prior hearing of Sonaecom, the report and final decision on the conditions of rights of use for numbers transferred from Optimus Telecomunicações, S.A. (Optimus) to Novis, S.A. (Novis), and on the transfer to Sonaecom of rights of use for numbers allocated to Telemilénio, Lda.

Allocation of rights to use numbers

In 2008 an allocation was made of 1.3 million geographic numbers, of which 190 thousand were for the area of Lisbon and 70 thousand were for Porto. Over the same period, 100 thousand numbers were recovered from other areas of the country.

With regard to non-geographic numbers, in Table 3 the distribution is shown of the numbers allocated and/or reserved (A) and recovered (R) by type of service:

With respect to non-geographic Audiotext numbers, 1,000 numbers were allocated or reserved in the general range (601) and 12,000 numbers were recovered, half of which concerned the number "601" and "608" (sales), and the other half, the numbers for Televoto (607), competitions and hobbies (646) and erotic numbers (648).