Mobile number portability (MNP) is planned to be introduced in Azerbaijan in October this year. The big three operators in the country, Azercell, Bakcell and Azerfon have been instructed to prepare the necessary infrastructure for the simultaneous introduction of the service.

Jayhun Mollazade was a man with an idea. As an Azerbaijani citizen living in the USA he saw an opportunity to dramatically improve the ageing and archaic soviet telecoms infrastructure of the former Soviet state. Over the past five years, Azerbaijan has put an emphasis on developing its ICT sector and as a result the country now has three mobile carriers along with several ISPs offering ADSL based fixed-line internet connectivity. While the broadband market was growing by 30-40 per cent each year only one of the local carriers was offering 3G services and Mollazade and his partners saw that there was a real opportunity to offer high speed wireless data services.