MNP finally here by end-January, regulator says

Qatar’s Supreme Council for ICT (ictQATAR) has announced on its website that mobile number portability (MNP) will be introduced by the end of January 2013. The much-delayed implementation of MNP in Qatar has seen several proposed target dates moved back; earlier predictions of ‘mid-2011’ were replaced by the regulator’s forecast that MNP would arrive in ‘summer 2012,’ but that date also came and went. ictQATAR announced that MNP was important to the liberalisation of the telecoms market, in which Vodafone Qatar competes against incumbent Qatar Telecom (Qtel).