Mobile operator Tigo Senegal, a subsidiary of Millicom International Cellular (MIC), says it is ready to do ‘battle with competitors’ as and when the industry regulator, L’Autorite de Regulation des Telecoms et des Postes (ARTP), implements mobile number portability (MNP) in the African country. According to the cellco’s general manager Diego Camberos, Tigo believes that: ‘the market is willing to operationalise mobile portability, which we believe will be very beneficial for our users’. In an interview published in the weekly Nouvel Horizon Senegal, Camberos said that MNP is an important opportunity for Tigo as it strives to compete with market leader Orange (Senegal) and Expresso Telecom.
As previously reported by TeleGeography’s CommsUpdate, at the end of last year the ARTP said it had pushed plans to launch an MNP regime to February 2015 – despite previous assurances that MNP would go live in October 2014. It was June 2014 when Abou Lo, former director general of ARTP, said that the country was on course to launch MNP by October. In an interview at the time, the former ARTP official said he had signed an edict on MNP guidelines in Senegal, including the process of selecting the firm to manage the running of the single platform for it. Lo’s statement followed a similar announcement in October 2013 in which the watchdog confirmed it was conducting a public consultation on a number portability regime, to help achieve an October 2014 launch. Despite the confident statements, the Senegalese population is still waiting for MNP to go live.