The finding delivered by Justice Frank Seepersad on July 28 was clear: "The court hereby declares that TSTT is legally obligated to implement FNP (fixed number portability) and the parties shall be heard on the issue of costs."
What was at stake here and what does it mean for consumers? What are the likely next steps?
The first response came from TSTT, which immediately shot back with a press release, noting that, "The court made no mandatory order against TSTT."
That might be interpreted as PR-speak for "We haven't been ordered to do anything."
TSTT's role in this judicial review of telecommunications law was as "an interested party," it noted in response to Justice Seepersad's findings.
The judge reviewed the laws governing fixed number portability – a customer's right to choose a provider while retaining their phone number that was implemented by the Telecommunications Authority (TATT) in 2017 after multiple delays.
[caption id="attachment_905426" align="alignnone" width="346"] Justice Frank Seepersad -[/caption]
In August 2014, after many meetings and stakeholder consultations on the matter, TATT issued Determination 2014/01 which promised fixed number portability by May 2015 to be managed by a third-party clearing-house.
Jamaica implemented number portability in June 2015 and within nine months had handled 60,000 porting cases.
When the determination was issued, a clearing-house had been appointed but not contracted to handle the project.
That wouldn't happen until March 2016 (https://technewstt.com/bd1031/), when Porting XS was announced as the clearing-house for local number portability.
The agreement on mobile number portability was signed in February 2016.
Under the system, a ported number, once disconnected, returns to the network that originated it.
Numbers requested from a carrier are supposed to be given up without coercion to win the number back.
These rules operate under a gentleman's agreement, since the regulations governing the practice of porting numbers are still a matter of mutual agreement, not law.
TATT declined to answer questions about the status of the regulations and whether they had been properly gazetted.
The complaint that Columbus Communications lodged with TATT that led to Justice Seepersad's deliberations isn't the first time that a telecommunications competitor has fretted about TSTT's approach to number portability.
In July 2020, DigicelTT announced that it had filed a court injunction against TSTT, "To stop its rejection of thousands of their subscribers wishing to port their numbers to the Digicel network."
In requesting the court's intervention, Digicel noted that, "Between January to June 14, a total of 9,274 porting requests were submitted by Digicel. There were 2,223 rejections for the six-month period."
In December 2020, the court firmly bounced the Digicel matter to TATT, when Just
