Nearly three million subscribers sign up for mobile number portability

A transaction office of VNPT in Hà Nội. — Photo ictnews.vietnamnet.vn

HÀ NỘI — More than 2.9 million subscribers have successfully performed the mobile number portability (MNP) process, after more than three years of implementation.

The MNP is carried out by six telecommunications enterprises: MobiFone, VNPT VinaPhone, Viettel, Vietnamobile, G-tel and Mobicast.

The number of registered subscribers transferred to Viettel is the highest, with more than 2.1 million subscribers.

There have been nearly 1.7 million subscribers successfully transferred to this network, accounting for 90.7 per cent of registered subscribers.

Notably, among the above six operators, the successful transfer rate to MobiFone is the lowest.

The Việt Nam Telecommunications Authority (VNTA) under the Ministry of Information and Communications said hundreds of thousands of subscribers had not successfully switched networks.

Many users said that the main reason for this was a ‘lucky SIM number’ that forces them to be committed to operators or additional services that they have bought.

To solve this problem, VNTA has recently asked the telecommunications carriers to publicly announce packages and how to cancel packages on their websites for subscribers to look up before registering to MNP.

At the same time, the authority recommended businesses have plans for subscribers to compensate them if there was a need to switch networks.

The VNTA also said that after more than three years of implementation, the MNP service had created necessary competition among businesses in the saturated mobile market towards the goal of retaining and enticing subscribers to their network.

The general trend was that subscribers wanted to switch to a service provider with wide coverage and stable service quality, noted the authority.

MNP gradually squeezing Vietnamobile

With a market share of only about 4 per cent (equivalent to nearly five million subscribers), Vietnamobile has lost a quarter of its subscribers since the service rolled out.

The network operator loses thousands of subscribers every month.

Since the service started in November 2018, nearly 25,000 subscribers have registered to move to Vietnamobile, but there are more than 1.4 million subscribers registered to switch networks.

Of these, the number of successful moving-in subscribers is 361 and the number of successful moving-out subscribers is more than 1.3 million.

Not only facing a massive “bleeding” of subscribers, limited bandwidth is also one of the main reasons why the operator struggles to develop new services.

A Vietnamobile representative told Việt Nam Finance online magazine that this made it difficult for the company in providing the best customer experience.

After 13 years on the market with a series of super-cheap price policies, Vietnamobile customers still complain about weak signal outside of the big cities, few agents, and poor customer service, meaning its market share has not improved. — VNS