Number Portability Administration Center

The Number Portability Administration Center (NPAC) disseminates network routing information specific to single 10-digit telephone numbers. Routing information is used for voice traffic and related vertical services in the Public Switched Telephone Network.

The NPAC originally was established to support enhanced routing capabilities required to facilitate Local Number Portability (LNP), which was mandated by the FCC to enhance local telephone service competition. Later, after the FCC mandated number pooling to extend the life of North America's 10-digit telephone number address schema, the NPAC and number portability made possible the implementation of national number pooling. Because the LNP network design allows routing decisions to be made at the individual telephone number level instead of limiting them to the granularity of a 10,000-number central office code, other uses of the NPAC and number portability capabilities are possible.

Since being awarded its first NPAC contract by the Illinois Commerce Commission in 1996, Neustar has won similar NPAC contracts in every region of the United States and Canada, and processes tens of millions of transactions per day through its NPAC Services Management System (SMS) database for more than 4,000 service providers across North America.

The NPAC allows local telephone service customers to:

• Retain telephone numbers when moving to another local service provider
• Retain telephone numbers when moving to different wire centers in the same local telephone service provider's network without loop extension

The NPAC also allows local telephone service providers to:

• Improve number utilization by obtaining number resources in blocks of 1,000 numbers each, instead of the previous 10,000-number minimum
• Rearrange networks without requiring customer number changes
• Define CCS-based vertical services network routing instructions for single telephone numbers when desired
• Move spare number inventories between switches when number utilization is not high enough to permit application for new numbers