Return of Licence from Mobile Virtual Network OperatorTrident Telecom Ventures Limited
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     The Office of the Telecommunications Authority (“OFTA”) announced today (September 2) that a Mobile Virtual Network Operator, Trident Telecom Ventures Limited (Trident), had notified OFTA earlier today that it relinquished its licence to OFTA with immediate effect.

     “In the interest of consumers, OFTA will make a special arrangement to enable continuation of porting of Trident’s numbers to other mobile networks for three months from today,” a spokesperson of OFTA said.

     In fact, services of Trident have been suspended since December 1, 2008 when its service agreement with its hosting mobile network operator was terminated because of contractual dispute.  Due to OFTA’s mediation between Trident and its hosting mobile network operator, affected customers had been given two weeks’ advance notice before the service suspension.

     “During the service suspension period, Trident has, upon OFTA’s request,  set up a hotline for refund registration and to follow up requests from its customers for number porting to other mobile networks.  OFTA has also advised Trident not to release, on its own or via its distributors, any unsold pre-paid SIM cards to end customers.  In the service suspension period, Trident has been trying to liaise with other mobile network operators with a view to resuming its services, but to no avail.  OFTA did not revoke Trident’s licence during this period as so doing will halt further number porting and make Trident’s attempt of service resumption impossible,” elaborated the spokesperson.

     According to OFTA’s records, Trident has less than 20,000 active pre-paid SIM users who are end customers at the time of service suspension.  In the past nine months, the number porting to other mobile networks has been carried out smoothly according to the requests of Trident’s customers.  Over 32,000 porting cases have been completed indicating that a substantial number of the users, who held Trident’s active pre-paid SIM cards at the time of service suspension, should have ported their numbers to other mobile networks, while migration of pre-paid SIM cards held by the distributors accounted for the rest.

     “In parallel with the return of the licence from Trident, we will get back the blocks of 400,000 numbers formerly allocated to it.  In the interest of consumers, OFTA will deploy its own resource to continue to help the porting of Trident’s numbers to other mobile networks after today.  This special arrangement will last for three months until December 2, 2009.  The relevant customers should approach their new mobile service operators direct for the porting arrangement,” the spokesperson continued.

     In response to press reports earlier today on a complaint by a distributor about difficulty of porting a large batch of Trident’s numbers, the spokesperson explained that porting of the 32,000 numbers over the past nine months has been completed smoothly with no major difficulty.  “We will continue to facilitate porting of Trident’s numbers in the following three months,” the spokesperson said.

Ends/Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Issued at HKT 20:37

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