Nine-digit switch to take effect on Saturday

The official announcement regarding this change was made 24 September l in Yaoundé, by the Minister of posts and Telecommunications (Minpostel), Jean-Pierre Biyiti bi Essam.

This will take effect on Friday, November 21, at midnight hence subscribers will be required to dial 6 digits before all Orange, MTN and Nexttel numbers before launching the call. For Camtel subscribers will rather need to compose 2 digits before the original number.

Telecommunications regulatory agency (ART) which oversees the transition indicated to consumers that "there is no administrative approach and technique change to these numbers, so each person will have to manually refresh their directory.

The new telephone numbering plan is designed to secure Cameroon to considerable changes in the telecommunications market, which has seen the number of subscribers in net growth since 1999.

Today, the country has about 16,000,000 subscribers to four operators. Resulting in the saturation of the current plan, materialized by the significant depletion of numbers allocated to each operator.

The change will allow them to have a resource numbering with a theoretical capacity of more than 800 million numbers which will meet various demands, including the development of communications "machine to machine" and other devices connected to the Internet.

The change of numbering marks the third operation of its kind in Cameroon for 13 years. The first failover was in 2001, from 6 to 7 digits dial plan, a second in 2007, leading to 8 digits and in few hours, the ninth digit would be adopted.