Consumers and businesses have choice of new telephone numbers

Commenting on the workshop, Mr. Alan Horne, General Director of TRA said "TRA aims for the new numbering plan to give greater choice to consumers and a better indication of the broad type of fee that applies to calls with different numbers.

We are now going to work with all Licensees to ensure that the Yellow pages and DQ services have all numbers issued by all operators with the exception of those where the customer wishes to be "ex Directory".

Of particular interest to Businesses are the special numbers allowing companies to offer their customers "freephone" services by dialling an eight digit number starting with 80XXXXXX or by paying extra for a 5 digit number commencing with 82XXX. In many countries information providers and some types of TV programmes use "Premium Charge" services where the consumer pays for information through the telephone charge. These numbers commence with 9 and also can be 8 or 5 digits in length depending upon what the consumer wishes to pay.

In addition TRA are keen to see a standard set of three digit service codes. These are allocated by TRA and apply to all operators and are set out in the attached table.

The new numbering plan, which was published earlier in the year, opened for allocation "universal numbers". Such numbers can be used for either fixed or mobile services, and can begin with 6 or 7 as the leading digit of an eight digit code.

TRA has reduced the fee it charges to Licensees from 1% of their annual revenues to 0.8%. However it has from the beginning of 2009 introduced an annual charge per number allocated to the operator.

telecommunications company in Bahrain must provide a greater level of visibility of their own use of numbers to their consumers, including any applicable tariffs" said Mr. Ahmed Aldoseri, TRA's ICT Operations Manager, who presented at the numbering workshop held recently.