Thai Regulator Publishes Mobile Number Portability Plans

Thailand's National Telecommunications Commission has published the final details of its plans for mobile number portability. The new rules will come into effect next month, although the operators will actually have up to three months to comply with the regulations.

The regulations also cap the fee for transferring a number to no higher than the current fee for a new PrePay SIM card.

The regulator has however decided to leave it to the operators to decide how to deal with customers porting a PrePay phone number where there is unused credit on the customer account.

The mobile operators have complained that the timeframe is too tight and that due to the high existing churn rate by PrePay users, there is limited demand for number portability anyway. Around 90% of Thailand's 60 million mobile subscribers use PrePay SIM cards.

Advanced Info Service (AIS) president Wichian Mektrakarn has suggested that the cost of setting up the central clearing house for porting numbers would cost around US$14 million.

On the web: National Telecommunications Commission

Posted to the site on 20th July 2009