Six months since the March implementation of nongeographic number portability, the process has been overwhelmingly efficient, the Internet Service Providers’ Association (ISPA) says.
The association adds that, prior to the implementation of full number portability earlier this year, South Africa had experienced 16 years of the partial implementation of number portability.
Corporates, small and medium-sized enterprises, nongovernmental organisations and others with 0800, 086 and 087 phone numbers have been able to move their usually heavily advertised contact numbers to more innovative providers from early March 2022 without losing those valuable digits.
ISPA says the Number Portability Company’s (NPC’s) overall functioning and implementation of this “vital element of free competition is smooth, slick and impressive”.
“Congratulations to the management and staff at the NPC for being a shining beacon of efficiency, excellence and transparency held together by the glue of accountability,” says ISPA chairperson André van der Walt.
The NPC, jointly owned by MTN, Vodacom, Cell C, Telkom and Liquid Intelligent Technologies, was established to facilitate number ports as a result of the 2001 Amendments to the Telecommunications Act, which mandated the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa to prescribe measures to ensure the introduction of number portability in 2005.
“Number portability has been a tremendous boost for competition in the telecommunications space, with the consumer and more agile, customer-focused providers the big winners.”
Over 13.6-million mobile numbers were ported from November 2006 to June 2022, averaging over 72 000 mobile ports a month.
From April 2010 to the end of June 2022, 2.9-million geographic numbers were successfully ported, with over 20 000 geographic ports undertaken each month.
About 10 929 nongeographic numbers were ported from March to July.
“This was an exercise some two years in planning, in which systematic incremental upgrades to our third-party software was done. A testing facility was provided early in the process for operators to prove their ability to use the system and to start systematically loading thousands of numbers into the test system,” NPC GM Clive Fagan says.
“Our goal was to provide a minimum of disruption to the existing number porting process and implement nongeographic number portability as seamlessly as possible without any downtime to the existing operation.”
He adds that cooperation and testing done by the industry contributed greatly to the smooth switchover.
“We had been waiting for the regulator to allow for nongeographic number porting for many years and Switch Telecom already had a number of nongeographic ports ready to be logged on the morning of March 7,” says ISPA member Switch Telecom MD Shannon Swanepoel.
“We have now successfully ported individual nongeographic numbers, as well as blocks of nongeographic numbers, for over 100 business clients. “These businesses have finally been freed from what was the last remaining vestige of Telkom’s monopoly.”
ISPA member Telviva chief commercial officer Rob Lith adds that the ability to port both geographic and nongeographic numbers has freed customers to move without friction to their provider of choice.
“This concludes the long-drawn-out process to deliver consumers their rights to retain numbers they have widely advertised and distributed to contacts, suppliers and customers.”