The Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) has been continuously supporting and improving number portability in the Kingdom of Bahrain since the introduction of the Numbering portability Regulation and deploying the required system in collaboration with the Telecommunications Operators in July 2011. Since then, residents and businesses in the Kingdom have been enjoying the flexibility of transferring their mobile and fixed lines seamlessly between telecoms service providers.
In 2016 Quarter 1, the Number Portability Platform has recorded 16,644 successful Mobile lines porting requests, compared to 12,843 in 1st quarter of 2015 and 4,611 Mobile lines porting requests were rejected compared to 2,964 in the 1st quarter of 2015. Meanwhile, the successful porting requests for Fixed line numbers reached 542 compared to 429 in 1st quarter of 2015, whereas 119 were rejected compared to 34 in the 1st quarter of 2015. In total, 113,902 numbers in the telecom market are currently ported between telecom operators until the first quarter of 2016 with an average time taken to port of 28 minutes for Mobile lines and 6 hours and 24 minutes for fixed lines.
The major reasons some porting requests were rejected are due to the Customers providing wrong CPR numbers (or Commercial Registration numbers) that don’t match the registered subscriber’s CPR number; The actual Mobile or Fixed line number that is requested to be ported being out of service; or the subscriber having a record of bad debt with his current service providers;
The TRA would like also to advise consumers that are willing to port their numbers to submit the porting request during official work hours (Sunday-Thursday, 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM) in order to benefit the most out of the set process and the agreed porting window among service providers, and get their telephone number ported at the same day. Also, the Consumers are advised to be aware of the date their bill is issued (referred to as a Billing Cycle) with their current service provider, to submit the porting request at least two days prior to the end of this date in order to avoid double billing from both operators.
Source: TRA-Bahrain