Colombia's Congress to Discuss Mobile Number Portability
Colombia's congress will discuss during a plenary session on October 30 a bill proposing to introduce mobile number portability (MNP), local daily Portafolio reported.
The initiative, originally proposed by congressman Simon Gaviria, was previously approved by a permanent congressional committee.
If approved, operators would be obliged to introduce MNP between January 1, 2008 and August 31, 2010.
Congress "would be legislating in favor of the consumer," many of whom have been "held hostage" by their operators, according to Gaviria.
Operators ought to assign 2.5% of their annual investments in networks to this project, he said.
Colombia has 29.4mn mobile users.
In Latin America, only Puerto Rico and Panama have fixed line number portability. The Dominican Republic and Mexico have published regulations on fixed and mobile NP, Brazil has published regulations on mobile NP, while Chile and Peru are examining the issue.
Number portability is largely seen to benefit the consumer as it obliges operators to improve quality of service and become more competitive in pricing.
However, Erasmo Rojas, Latin America and Caribbean director for GSM lobby group 3G Americas is suspicious about how successful it is likely to be given that 80% of mobile users in Latin America are prepaid. According to Rojas, NP is of more use to postpaid customers, especially business users, as losing their number could mean losing potential clients.
"The beneficiary is the end user, but there are not very tangible benefits apart from the liberty to be able to move from one operator to another," Rojas told BNamericas.
According to Gartner analyst Tuong Nguyen, who specializes in value added wireless services, NP is going to be most successful in markets where there is limited competition, such as Mexico where the largest mobile operator Telcel controls 68% of the market.
NP should give smaller players an incentive to compete on price and quality with Telcel, Nguyen told BNamericas.
Posted to the site on 23rd October 2007
