Summary

  • Mauritius has created a portability-provider licence category and set its regulatory fees. The published application document is still a draft, not evidence of an award or a working service.
  • The proposal separates the shared provider from mobile operators through ownership and access rules. Reliable switching would also require the central database and operators' own systems to agree on where a number belongs.

A phone number is one of the awkward things to leave behind when changing networks. Friends know it. Work contacts have saved it. A bank may use it to deliver a security code. In its draft application document, Mauritius's Information and Communication Technologies Authority (ICTA) describes the need to change that number as a deterrent to switching provider.

Its answer is mobile number portability: keep the number, move the subscription. Behind that simple promise sits an unusual bargain. Customers would gain more freedom to change mobile networks, while one independent company would receive exclusive responsibility for the shared portability system.

The arrangement need not undermine competition. A common service can spare every operator from building a separate national solution. But it puts considerable weight on the hand-offs between companies. A customer should not have to discover which database is wrong before someone restores a call or message.

An approved licence category, an unfinished call

Part of this reform is already law. Category C.15 in the current consolidated ICT Act, added by GN 13 of 2026, establishes the centralised portability service and bars public operators from owning equity in its provider, directly or indirectly. The draft adds the reverse restriction: the provider would not own equity in a public operator. Those two directions should not be presented as having the same legal status.

The selection process is less settled in the material reviewed. ICTA's project page says it intends to license one successful applicant after validating the call. The linked application PDF carries a draft watermark and an unfilled deadline. The 7 October news release reports the opening of a three-day workshop; it does not announce the workshop's decisions.

Checks of those documents and the regulator's notices, tender and licence pages on 23 October did not establish an award or a live service. That is a limit of the available evidence, not proof that no further decision exists.

The draft gives the choice a long horizon. It proposes 15 years from the effective date of the signed licence agreement, subject to earlier termination or revocation. Another ten years could follow at the provider's request, on ICTA's conditions. The nine-month readiness period would start at the award, not at the workshop. None of these provisions supplies a calendar launch date.

A central record does not mean a central query for every call

The proposed provider would operate a clearinghouse and number-portability database. Mobile, fixed and international operators would receive current information so they could send traffic to the correct network. The draft calls the routing approach All Call Query, or ACQ.

That label can mislead. It does not, by itself, mean every call must make a live trip to a central database. Operators can consult local copies of portability information. ICTA's draft expressly asks applicants how long an accepted request would take to reach the central database and then operators maintaining those copies. Its technical workshop cards put the database arrangement and synchronisation choices up for discussion.

Local copies can keep a call from depending on a live central lookup, but they must be current. An accepted transfer and a successful central update would not alone show that every relevant network has caught up. This is a possible failure mechanism to design against, not a report of a failed Mauritius transfer.

The draft recognises how far the consequences could reach. It asks applicants to explain calls, texts, USSD, roaming and delivery of one-time passwords used by financial services. It also requires service across the outer islands, round-the-clock fault support, redundancy and disaster recovery. These are substantial obligations. What the retained document does not establish is the final numerical standard for each delay, failure or recovery interval.

Two different bills

Fees are another place where an unfinished commercial design can be mistaken for an absence of rules. The licensing regulations already set the provider's initial regulatory fee at Rs 100,000. The annual fee is the higher of Rs 100,000 or 0.8% of audited gross annual turnover for the penultimate licensee financial year, capped at Rs 2 million.

That is the bill for holding the licence. It does not determine the price of a port, a database query, an operator connection or a customer's switch. The application draft asks bidders for proposed charges and a financial plan covering at least ten years. The distinction matters: a statutory fee schedule cannot answer who ultimately pays for the shared service.

ICTA proposes a comparative, qualitative selection rather than an automatic win for the cheapest bidder. The draft asks for at least five continuous years of portability-system experience in one or more countries. It weighs technical performance, neutrality, implementation risk and financial strength. That gives room to reject a bargain that would be fragile, but makes the eventual reasons for choosing a sole provider worth explaining.

Independence needs more than a share register

Ownership separation removes one obvious route for a mobile operator to favour itself. The proposed non-discriminatory access rule goes further. Neither establishes, in advance, that operators will receive updates equally promptly or that faults at the boundary between their systems will be resolved fairly.

The draft also contains an exit provision: surrender would require compelling grounds and at least a year's notice. It would be wrong to say there is no way out. Equally, a notice period does not demonstrate that the service and its records can be handed over without interruption.

A regional comparison shows how precisely such duties can be divided. Seychelles' 2023 regulations distinguish the clearinghouse's minimum seven-year recordkeeping duty from the donor and recipient operators' minimum twelve months. They also describe local routing databases receiving clearinghouse updates. The 2025 amendment places regulatory authority with Seychelles Communications Regulatory Authority and changes implementation periods. These are legal arrangements, not evidence of good service, and they do not apply in Mauritius.

For Mauritius, the next useful document would show which proposals survived consultation and translate broad reliability requirements into commitments that can be checked. The hosting clause, for example, still combines local on-premises wording with consideration of a cloud solution. Neither location label would prove resilience on its own.

Customers would also need a clear route to challenge a delayed or rejected transfer. Published service targets and aggregate results could show whether promises are being met without exposing sensitive network details; incident and recovery records would allow particular failures to be examined. These are recommendations for the final arrangement, not results that the workshop has already delivered.

The consumer promise remains admirably simple: a number should follow its user. Delivering it requires several companies to agree, repeatedly, on the same destination. The final licence should make responsibility just as clear when they do not.

Clarification and update, 24 October 2026: this version distinguishes enacted licensing and fee rules from the application draft, clarifies that ACQ need not involve a live central query for every call, and adds the draft's surrender provision. The Seychelles comparison now separates clearinghouse and operator recordkeeping duties and includes the 2025 amendment.