On September 20th 2014, the provinces of Jiangxi, Hubei and Yunnan activated the number portability trial to public. Previously, Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has organized the transformation trial in Tianjin and Hainan since November, 2010.
MIIT launched the number portability expansion trial in 2013; Hainan Province has adjusted the project from single-track to bi-direction on May 17th this year.
With the joint efforts of all sides, Jiangxi, Hubei and Yunnan have prepared ready for number portability trial and opened it to the public on September 20th.
Insiders believes the situaition of new activated number portability is not pessimistic, “Only with ‘free identification’ can the phone numbers be transformed to another network, but many contract phones, bindling phones cannot.”Thus limitations exist.
In fact, among more than 18 million phone users in Tianjin and Hainan which have conducted the trial, less than 1% users raise the network portability application, only about 70,000 users have succeeded in application in pilot areas and the successful portability rate is only 36.7% after application.
Number portability has no extra burdens for users, but it’s another situation for operators. Reports of China Academy of Telecommunication Research points out that the successful portability rate is not high, for operators set kinds of thresholds through technological methods to prevent users from taking numbers to other networks.
Besides, it needs operators to upgrade and maintain the present network, user database and charge system to carry out number portability, which means the increasing network operating cost.