MNP improvements expected by 20 April

Thailand’s National Broadcasting & Telecommunications Commission (NBTC) has set a preliminary deadline of 20 April for the country’s cellcos – AIS, DTAC, True, TOT and CAT – to upgrade the capacity of their mobile number portability (MNP) facilities, local newspaper The Nation reports. The upgrade should enable all five operators to handle ‘unlimited’ volumes of user requests for MNP, compared to a current limit of 4,000 number porting requests per day, while the time taken to fulfill each port should be speeded up from the current three days to a single-day process. The need for MNP is expected to increase exponentially following the recent issuing of full 3G network operating licences to private sector operators AIS, DTAC and True, which are looking to migrate all users from networks operated under build-transfer-operate (BTO) concessions with state-owned TOT and CAT, a requirement hastened by the approaching expiry of the licensed frequencies associated with the BTO agreements.