The Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority (TDRA) announced that more than 1.7 million mobile phone numbers have been transferred between licensees since the launch of the service back in 2013, while the number of porting requests from the beginning of this year until the end of late August reached nearly 200,000. This turnout reflects TDRA’s success in delivering services and initiatives that contribute to raising customer satisfaction and happiness.
TDRA pointed out that it has during late August, and in cooperation with licensees, developed systems and automated procedures, thereby optimizing the approval time for individuals’ requests to port numbers to become less than an hour for most of these requests (down from the previous approval time of 7 working hours).
Commenting on this service, Eng. Saif bin Ghelaita, executive director of TDRA’s technology development affairs department, said, “At TDRA, we are keen to develop our services and improve performance in a way that achieves customer happiness, which is the ultimate goal we seek to achieve. Through this service, we have given customers the opportunity to switch between operators and try their offerings while keeping the same telephone numbers, which are now an important part of our identity.”
Eng. Bin Ghelaita stressed that TDRA continues to introduce new initiatives and develop its services, adding, “We, in TDRA, are committed to the wise leadership's directives towards achieving the happiness of all segments and groups of the Emirati society, and therefore we constantly seek to re-examine services and ways of delivering them with the aim of simplifying procedures and harnessing the available technologies and resources, as well as capitalizing on the experiences of countries of the world in developing our services. What the UAE has achieved in smart services and digital transformation, according to key global indicators, is clear evidence that we are on track.”
TDRA confirmed that it is making continuous efforts to follow up on the commitment of service providers to deliver a high quality and efficient service to customers. Furthermore, TDRA periodically performs extensive application reviewing, and seeks to address any challenges that may arise – all in order to provide a best quality service and achieve customer happiness.
According to TDRA, the Mobile Number Portability (MNP) service between service providers, i.e. Emirates Telecommunications Corporation "Etisalat" and Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company "du", applies to all mobile phone numbers starting with (050, 055, 052, 054, 058, and 056), where they can be ported from one operator to another, noting that the service allows customers to make the switch to their favorite service provider, with the possibility of reverting to the previous one in 3 working days' time (if services of the new service provider do not meet the subscriber’s needs) or within a month following the porting of the number to the other service provider.