Number Portability Time Slashed

Mobilk - Residents in the Kingdom of Bahrain have been enjoying  flexibility for transferring  their personal numbers freely between the Telecom service providers since the number portability facility was introduced by the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) of the Kingdom of Bahrain in July 2011.  

The TRA announced that as an ongoing initiative to protect consumers’ interests, relevant amendments to the existing Regulation have been incorporated and  instructions issued to the service providers for slashing the processing time of  number portability requests, effective 8th April, 2014.  .   

As per the revised regulation, the service providers are legally bound to complete any mobile number portability request made by the consumer within a period of 8 business hours, which was earlier set as 48 hours.   Similarly, the processing time period for any fixed number portability request has also been reduced from 72 hours to 8 business hours, but can be extended for another 8 business hours,  in case the provider faces any technical difficulties in carrying out the request successfully.

As another major initiative by the TRA,  the GCC citizens who had availed telecommunication services  in the Kingdom of Bahrain using their GCC IDs can also benefit from from the facilities of number portability by producing their GCC ID while making a portability request to the concerned service provider.     All GCC Identification smart cards were made valid for both Government and non-Governmental purposes vide the Legislative Decree No. 2 of 2013.

The total number of mobile number portability requests processed stand at  125684 and the  fixed number portability requests at since the number portability facility was introduced by the TRA in July  and October 2011 respectively.