TRA: 18 minutes is the average time taken for mobile ports in March 2015

Mobilk - In light of the Authority’s unremitting endeavors for empowering consumers and promoting competition in the telecommunications sector , the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) of the Kingdom of Bahrain reduced the time taken for a port to be successful to an average of 18 minutes on mobile ports and 33 minutes for fixed line ports  while it took  three working hours for mobile ports and three working hours and fifty minutes for fixed ports last year.

The Authority’s Technical & Operations Director Eng. Mohammed Alnoaimi stated that since the Authority launched the number portability system in the kingdom in 2011 which allowed the residents of Bahrain the ability to change providers seamlessly while keeping their original numbers and as of March 2015, the number of requests for mobile number port-outs have reached 186,749 in total with an average of 4,150 requests per month, while fixed line requests tally up to 4,958 in total with a monthly average of 118. 

Eng. Alnoaimi added that the Authority strives to continuously work towards improving the process of number portability in the interest of serving the public at large, and recently, the TRA has taken notice through its monitoring that there happens to be a significant percentage of number portability requests getting automatically rejected by the number portability system due to consumers placing requests to transfer to another provider while still having unpaid dues with the original operator the service began with. In light of this, the Authority hereby makes a public service announcement that if there are any balances remaining with the original operator that are unpaid, such requests will get rejected.