Local number portability
telephone number portability for landline users
Local number portability (LNP) for fixed lines, and full mobile number portability (FMNP) for mobile phone lines, refers to the ability of a "customer of record" of an existing fixed-line or mobile telephone number assigned by a local exchange carrier (LEC) to reassign the number to another carrier ("service provider portability"), move it to another location ("geographic portability"), or change the type of service ("service portability"). In most cases, there are limitations to transferability with regards to geography, service area coverage, and technology. Location Portability and Service Portability are not consistently defined or deployed in the telecommunication industry.
In the United States and Canada, mobile number portability is referred to as WNP or WLNP (Wireless LNP). In the rest of the world it is referred to as mobile number portability (MNP). Wireless number portability is available in some parts of Africa, Asia, Australia, Latin America and most European countries including Britain; however, this relates to transferability between mobile phone lines only. Canada, South Africa and the United States are the only countries that offer full number portability transfers between both fixed lines and mobile phone lines, because mobile and fixed line numbers are mixed in the same area codes, and are billed identically for the calling party, the mobile user usually pays for incoming calls and texts; in other countries all mobile numbers are placed in higher priced mobile-dedicated area codes and the originator of the call to the mobile phone pays for the call. The government of Hong Kong has tentatively approved fixed-mobile number portability; however, as of July 2012, this service is not yet available.
Some cellular telephone companies will charge for this conversion as a regulatory cost recovery fee.
History
LNP was invented by Edward Sonnenberg while working for Siemens.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Local number portability” as telephone number portability for landline users. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6664461. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2012.
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This entry incorporates text from “Local number portability” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.