Senator Sherwin Gatchalian on Friday warned telecommunications companies against attempts to further delay the already forestalled implementation of the Mobile Number Portability Act, saying they will be levied appropriate penalties.
The MNPA, otherwise known as Republic Act 11202 or the Act Requiring Mobile Service Providers To Provide Nationwide Mobile Number Portability To Subscribers, imposes as much as a P1-million fine to telcos.
It will also revoke their franchises to operate if they will repeatedly refuse to implement the portability within the period allowed under the law, Gatchalian said.
The MNPA allows subscribers to transfer from one service provider to another without changing their mobile numbers free of charge.
Gatchalian said the law should have been carried out as early as January 2020 since the law was signed in February 2019 and the Implementing Rules and Regulations were issued in June 2019.
But in a letter to the senator by the telcos in December 2019, Globe Telecom, Smart Communications and Dito Telecommunity said they needed an independent third party contractor to manage mobile porting services to ensure better interoperability and might take until July this year to set up the whole mechanism.
A telco representative, during Wednesday’s Senate Public Services committee hearing, said the telcos will start the interoperability test in June this year and will carry out the full commercial launch by September. They cited the pandemic as the reason behind the revised timeline.
“The current situation should enable our consumers to easily shift without much of a fuss to another network that offers better services, especially since our daily grind is practically dependent nowadays on the telcos’ services,” Gatchalian, principal author of the landmark legislation, said.
“We were not yet hit by the pandemic when this was enacted into law. Now, we have COVID-19 and its variants. The National Telecommunications Commission should see to it that telcos strictly follow the law.”