On Feb­ru­ary 16, a small mo­ment in lo­cal telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions his­to­ry was marked.The Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Au­thor­i­ty of Trinidad and To­ba­go (TATT) an­nounced that lo­cal tele­coms providers would sign an agree­ment that day to al­low num­ber porta­bil­i­ty be­tween their ser­vices.

The new fea­ture for lo­cal phone users will be im­ple­ment­ed at the end of this month for mo­bile phones and in Sep­tem­ber for fixed line phone num­bers.

This re­moves the last im­ped­i­ment to the free flow of cus­tomers be­tween ri­val telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions car­ri­ers, be­cause some­one with an in­vest­ment in a par­tic­u­lar phone num­ber now more de­ci­sive­ly owns that as­pect of their iden­ti­ty and can car­ry it with them to a new provider.

Some key as­pects of the new ca­pa­bil­i­ty were dis­cussed at a pub­lic fo­rum at TATT's of­fices on Thurs­day last week.A num­ber can be moved be­tween providers of the same kind. Mo­bile to mo­bile, fixed line to fixed line, but can­not move across tech­nolo­gies, so you can't move a mo­bile num­ber to a fixed line.

The process, which calls for a cus­tomer to vis­it a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the car­ri­er they are mov­ing to, is man­dat­ed to take no more than three days by TATT, but there is sup­posed to be on­ly a five-minute cut-over pe­ri­od as the num­ber is moved be­tween car­ri­ers and re­ac­ti­vat­ed.The ser­vice costs one dol­lar per year, which pays the dig­i­tal clear­ing house com­pa­ny Port­ing XS of the Nether­lands for their back­ground work in man­ag­ing the rout­ing of the new port­ed num­ber data­base.

Ex­pect the usu­al amount of sup­port­ing ev­i­den­tiary pa­per­work to ac­com­pa­ny the process for some time, as car­ri­ers need doc­u­ments to prove that you, per­son­al­ly own the phone num­ber. The process should take around half an hour.Your ac­count must be ac­tive, and your out­stand­ing bills paid up be­fore the port­ing process can be­gin.

The hand­set must be car­ri­er un­locked. Ac­count own­ers are re­spon­si­ble for ter­mi­nat­ing their con­tracts and mak­ing ap­plic­a­ble pay­ments be­fore mak­ing the num­ber trans­fer. Re­cip­i­ent car­ri­ers may fol­low in­ter­na­tion­al in­cen­tive pro­grammes and pay those ter­mi­na­tion fees.

If a port­ed num­ber is dis­con­nect­ed, the num­ber is re­turned to the donor's net­work. If it has been port­ed more than once, it be­comes part of the Port­ing XS data­base, which be­comes the block hold­er for such num­bers.

The process is re­cip­i­ent-led, and the donor com­pa­ny, the car­ri­er sur­ren­der­ing the num­ber, is not sup­posed to con­tact the cus­tomer ac­cord­ing to the gen­tle­men's agree­ments which gov­ern the process.There are no es­tab­lished laws gov­ern­ing "win-back" tac­tics, and it re­mains to be seen just what hap­pens if one car­ri­er finds it­self los­ing large num­bers of cus­tomers to an­oth­er.

TATT pro­pos­es to amend leg­is­la­tion ac­cord­ing to re­al­world need as the process plays out.

Ja­maica im­ple­ment­ed num­ber porta­bil­i­ty in June 2015 and to date, 60,000 port­ing cas­es have been han­dled. T&T was sup­posed to im­ple­ment its num­ber porta­bil­i­ty pro­gramme for mo­bile num­bers in Feb­ru­ary 2015 and for fixed lines in May 2015, ac­cord­ing to di­rec­tives from TATT. Both dead­lines were missed.

SMS and voice mar­ket­ing ser­vices keen to min­imise cross-car­ri­er call­ing costs may be able to re­quest copies of the data­base of port­ed num­bers, since pre­fix num­bers will no longer iden­ti­fy the car­ri­er to which a num­ber be­longs.

TATT pro­vides a de­tailed FAQ about the process on its web­site as a down­load­able file

http://ow.ly/Z8dGc .