Number portability allows clients of fixed and mobile telephony services to change provider while keeping their number.

Cullen International’s latest research in the Americas shows that all of the studied countries regulate mobile number portability. Fixed number portability is available in Brazil, Canada, Chile, Mexico, Peru and the United States. In Argentina, fixed number portability is mandated but not implemented yet.

Most countries in the Americas use a centralised database, with an independent database administrator managing portability.

In all the researched countries, users can make a remote request to start the process and, in most of them, ID validation can also be done remotely.

In general, the timeframe for portability is between one and three days. Among the surveyed countries, Paraguay and the United States do not regulate porting time.

Cullen International’s newly designed Americas Telecoms benchmark shows: the year of introduction in each country; the routing solution; who administers the centralised database; whether there are any wholesale charges; and details of the portability process.

For more information and access to the full benchmark, please click on “Access the full content” - or on “Request Access”, in case you are not subscribed to our Americas Telecoms Service.