Agreement Signed to Activate Mobile Number Portability Service Among Mobile Telecommunications Companies in the Kingdom

The heads of the three mobile telecommunications companies — Saudi Telecom Company, Etihad Etisalat Company (Mobily), and Mobile Telecommunications Company (Zain) — signed, at the headquarters of the Communications and Information Technology Commission and in the presence of His Excellency the Governor of the Commission, a commercial agreement for mobile number portability service among them in a new format aimed at bringing Zain Saudi Arabia into the number portability service system as a third party in the service, in addition to Saudi Telecom Company and Mobily, so that the company's mobile phone subscribers will be able to port their numbers to or from the company. The agreement also aims to facilitate and ease the number portability process for subscribers wishing to benefit from the service, support its smooth operation between companies, and eliminate the negative issues that have recently accompanied number portability. Certain provisions and clauses have been included in this agreement, which the Commission hopes will help curb non-compliant practices in the provision of the service, the most important of which are:

1- Enabling temporarily suspended numbers to be ported, and limiting the reasons for rejecting portability requests to four main reasons: the first being a mismatch between the ID number submitted with the portability request and the number registered with the donor service provider; the second being failure to pay the required financial dues; the third being that a period of two months has not passed since the number was established or ported; and the last reason being that the number to be ported has been cancelled or has not been issued to the subscriber.

2- Emphasizing compliance with the Commission's regulations issued in this regard, and not rejecting any portability request without a regulatory justification.

This new format of the agreement was prepared after a series of meetings and discussions between experts and officials responsible for overseeing number portability service at the companies, under the Commission's supervision, benefiting from the experience gained by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in operating the service over the past five years, as well as applying the latest developments in this field. The Commission has noted the operators' desire to reactivate the service and restore it to its normal state.

The Communications and Information Technology Commission's oversight of this agreement comes within the framework of its continuous monitoring of the number portability service's operation, and its keenness to ensure its continued functioning in a manner that safeguards the rights of both subscribers and operators alike.

It is worth noting that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is among the pioneering countries worldwide in making this feature available to subscribers, and is the first country in the Middle East, Africa, and the Islamic world to offer this feature, having launched it in the Kingdom on 11/06/1427H, corresponding to 08/07/2006.