As Caribbean coun­tries fur­ther imple­ment telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions sec­tor reform and new mar­ket entrants get ready to deploy new telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions net­works, reg­u­la­tors must put reg­u­la­tion and pol­i­cy in place that will low­er the bar­ri­ers to mar­ket entry.

One of the major bar­ri­ers to mar­ket entries is the new mar­ket entrant’s abil­i­ty to get pos­si­ble con­sumers to switch ser­vice providers. A rea­son pre­vent­ing con­sumers to switch is that in the past, direc­to­ry num­bers are direct­ly assigned to oper­a­tors and not to con­sumers. By own­ing the con­sumers direc­to­ry num­ber the incum­bent oper­a­tor basi­cal­ly owned the con­sumers, which gives the incum­bent oper­a­tors an advan­tage over the new entrants.

Con­sumers that want to switch ser­vice providers would have to give up their direc­to­ry num­bers. This impos­es a high incon­ve­nient switch­ing cost. In order to resolve this issue, reg­u­la­tors must intro­duce leg­is­la­tion that man­dates direc­to­ry num­bers to be portable to and between all telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions oper­a­tors. The intro­duc­tion and imple­men­ta­tion of num­ber porta­bil­i­ty (NP) is not an easy task as it requires exten­sive plan­ning by both the reg­u­la­tor and the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion oper­a­tors.

Tele­Con­sul­tan­cy has the resources to assist the reg­u­la­tors to craft reg­u­la­tion and pol­i­cy rules, sys­tems and process­es that will allow them to imple­ment a num­ber porta­bil­i­ty plan that will stim­u­late the cre­ation of a com­pet­i­tive mar­ket. The num­ber porta­bil­i­ty assis­tance of Tele­Con­sul­tan­cy is aimed at reduc­ing time and cost to intro­duce and main­tain num­ber porta­bil­i­ty, facil­i­tate on-time com­pli­ance and real­iz­ing the intend­ed com­pet­i­tive mar­ket envi­ron­ment.