About 2.61 million telephone numbers have been ported by the end of 2015, which means that their owners changed their telecom suppliers, according to the Communication Authority ANCOM.

More than three-quarters of them (2 million) were mobile phone numbers while the remaining 590,000 were fixed line numbers.

Almost 845,000 phone numbers were transferred from one network to another last year.

An average of over 70,300 numbers were ported each month in 2015, compared to some 47,000 number in 2014 and almost 23,000 numbers in 2013.

The mobile phone operators managed to steal 723,000 users from their competitors through porting last year. Almost half of them (340,000) chose the local telecom operator RCS & RDS, which has come to the market with very low offers. Vodafone got almost 154,000 new numbers through porting. Orange ranked third, with some 128,000 new users, followed by Telekom Romania Mobile Communications (76,700), and Telekom Romania Communications (16,500).

More than half of the users who ported their numbers had phone subscriptions whereas 48% had pre-paid cards.

editor@romania-insider.com