VnnNews – The Ministry of Information and Communication is working on a policy that allows mobile subscribers to not have to change numbers despite changing networks.
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Chief of the Telecommunications Department Pham Hong Hai said that this policy is being drafted and will be introduced to collect opinions from related firms.
The Ministry of Post and Telecommunications (now the MoIC) researched this plan three years ago and planed to implement it when the telecom market developed and market share was clearly divided.
Telecom companies also agreed with this plan, reasoning that this policy has been applied in a number of other countries in the world, when the market reached saturation for numbers. This included Hong Kong, Japan and the US.
However, an official from the mobile network, which accounts for over 30 percent of the market, said that this policy cannot be applied immediately, but possibly within the next two years. He said that around 20 million people in Vietnam don’t use mobile phones, equivalent to over 30 million subscribers so competition between telecom firms at this moment and in the near future will focus on new subscribers.
An official of another mobile network said that this policy will benefit users but telecom firms will have to invest a lot in infrastructure and changing technology. It is also difficult for controlling subscribers and it would be complicated to figure out sharing ratios between mobile networks.
Viettel and S-Fone are the first two networks permitting clients to keep their numbers when they change between the two networks. However, the first three digits or the network codes must be changed.
Meanwhile, the plan MoIC is working on allows users to keep their whole number.
PV
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