Convergencia Research, Consultoría especializada en Latinoamérica y Caribe
Wednesday, January 26, 2022

Start of fixed portability in Argentina extended for 120 days

The companies were preparing to operate since February. Costs and adaptations faced by large, medium and small operators.

Through resolution 32/2022 published yesterday in the Official Gazette, Enacom ordered the postponement of the Start of Operations and Implementation of Number Portability for Fixed Telephony Services, "in order to carry out the correct implementation of number portability.

The regulator argued that it had received presentations from Portable Service Providers (PSP), about "delays in the process of implementing Number Portability as well as statements about certain inconveniences to meet the deadlines established in the aforementioned Schedule".

In its 2nd article, the regulation instructs PSPs to adhere to the contract with the Database Administrator awarded by the Comité de Portabilidad Numérica (COPON) (Number Portability Committee), within a period of ten days, under penalty of applying sanctions.

Updates. Telephone operators must update their systems and equipment to be able to make lines portabilities. Specific investments and amounts will depend on each case on the level of each firm and its state of technological update. But in general it is expected that the big players in the market will have to make the most important effort. The small and medium-sized operators assure that they do not foresee significant investments.

It is mainly about software adaptations while the purchase of equipment is perceived as less important. The process contemplates the transition from switching, the system used to be able to connect different devices to the same network, to modern interconnections through data networks from which greater flexibility and redundancy are expected.

The companies will have to modernize the management systems, explained Ignacio Ribeiro, head of the Comisión de Telefonía de la Cámara Argentina de Internet (Cabase) (Telephony Commission of the Argentine Internet Chamber). “When a call is passed from one operator to another, it is necessary to know which operator the call belongs to in order to know through which interconnection it is sent,” he pointed out.

And he added: “The Database Administrator (ABD), APA Sociedad Anónima, of Chilean origin, has all the communication ranges and knows which operator each Routing Number belongs to. This new logic implies a radical change with respect to the current system. Ultimately, the initiative implies something much more complex and important than just implementing fixed portability", considered the specialist.

Ribeiro is also CEO of the company Llamada IP, which participates in the Portability Committee (Copito), made up of the main stakeholders in porting since 2022. To graph the difference with the large operators, the executive stated that this company, which has been from the beginning an IP telephony company in the cloud, “will have to cover the transactional cost of US$75 for each line; the fixed costs to establish VPN, which are US$500 per year; and finally the work of the technicians who carry out the implementation of the system is paid. But in hardware we do not invest too much”.

Routing numbers. In the last days of November, in the process of implementing Fixed Portability, the Ente Nacional de las Comunicaciones (Enacom) awarded Routing Numbers (RN) for all telephone operators.

The RNs are necessary identifiers for each company to operate in the system. In fact, Enacom's attribution reached 401 telephone operators and Virtual Mobile Network Operators (MVNO) throughout the country.

Until now, portability existed only in mobile telephony and the three large providers, Personal, Movistar and Claro, were the only ones that had a RN. With the incorporation of fixed numbering to portability, operators also had to have that number.

The RN was a fundamental subject in the list of steps to be able to carry out portability (in this case, an administrative step in charge of the regulatory entity) and that releases operators to start complying with the rest of the necessary steps, updates and implementations for the era starting in 2022.

Cabase took responsibility for the management of the RNs in conjunction with the Comité de Portabilidad Técnica (Copon) (Technical Portability Committee): "In this way we ensure that all players have this identifier to work on the new number portability system."

Ribeiro, highlighted that the award of the RN: “supposes an order that in perspective will allow us to speak in the future of geographic portability; If a client moves from Córdoba to Mar del Plata, he will be able to keep the 351 at his new address”, he told Convergencia.

He also affirmed that the order would allow progress in the national single rate scheme, by removing 15 from cellular numbers and unifying the country's numbering plan. The companies also project that fixed-mobile/mobile-fixed portability can be implemented in the way Chile and the United States do. They also speculate with the ordering of interconnection costs.

In addition, in the case of cooperatives and medium-sized operators, it is thought that the implementation of these identification numbers will cause these players to end up migrating to IP protocols, which would require an investment in equipment that allows them to work in IP interconnection. This can be a problem because many of these operators lack support for their equipment.

In Argentina there are more than 60 million active mobile numbers and about 8 million fixed lines. Since mobile number portability came into force in March 2012, more than 15 million mobile numbers have been ported in the country. The APA Database Management Company, a joint venture formed by Connectiv and Temark, has a contract that will end in 2026.

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