The Superintendency of Industry and Commerce (SIC) after investigating Claro and Movistar for rejecting the number portability of their users without evidence has now ordered the two companies to contact the different users whose porting requests are rejected by telephone and make it effective.
Also read: What you should know about number portability in Colombia
In addition, the entity has indicated by means of two orders, that companies must put on their web pages and their social networks that users who have loyalty links no more charges will be charged for these and
who have the right to carry out the number portability process at any
moment
The SIC will also reduce that the two companies must refrain from continuing
carrying out any type of retention practice for users who want to carry their
number to another operator.
To comply with these measures, the operators have to accredit it within a term of ten (10) business days, counted from the business day following the notification of the decision that was made last Friday by the Office of the Delegate Superintendent for Business Affairs. jurisdictional
Portability is the right of users to change operators while maintaining the same number.
The reasons for the investigation
On June 22, the SIC will extend that each company could face fines of up to 17,400 million pesos for not Send to the database administrator the documents provided by the regulation to support rejection events due to arrears and ownership of users who want to change operator, keeping the same number of their mobile line.
The investigation arose from various complaints and inspection visits to Claro and Movistar between January and April of this yearwhich made it possible to preliminarily find that these operators, apparently, demonstrated grounded rejections in these situations without having the evidence required by the regulation.
If the violation by the investigated companies is confirmed, fines of up to 17,400 million pesos may be imposed for each company, once the procedure established as a guarantee of the rights of defense and contradiction of these operators is exhausted.
security Secretary
In the first three months of 2023, some 1.78 million mobile phone users made use of their right, in what is known as mobile number portability (PNV). This means that about 20,000 people a day made the modification according to data from the Communications Regulation Commission (CRC).
The number of successful portations has decreased from 87 percent to 48 percent between 2020 and 2023, reaching 1.92 million rejected applications between January and March of this year.
In addition, in the first quarter of 2023 transport operations reached 1.78 millionwhich represents a decrease of 10.99 percent compared to the immediately previous quarter (2 million) and a reduction of 5.51 percent compared to the first quarter of 2022.
In the first quarter of the year, 1,920,967 requests for portability were rejected.
Compared to last year, the CRC said that of the total 8 million requests to carry in 2022, more than 50 percent were denied.
So of every 10 users who want to change operator, only 5 can complete the process.
