Porting on the up - June 08

We note the progress being made by UKPorting, the industry consortium set up by Ofcom to…

“facilitate the Mobile and Fixed telecommunications industry in implementing the changes to General Condition 18 set out in Ofcom's Concluding Statement on Telephone Number Portability published on November 29th 2007”

The regulator has given the industry a set of targets to (in essence), create a central database of ported numbers (fixed and mobile) and to ensure that the database is populated accordingly.

This database has to be up and running by the 31st of December 2008 with all ported mobile numbers in it by 1st Sept 2009 and all ported fixed line numbers in it by 31st December 2012.

The same timescales apply respectively for mobile and fixed line operators to route directly calls to these ported numbers.

The emphases for increased efficiencies are currently focused on the mobile industry where the UK is particularly bad when compared to the rest of Europe. The targets state that porting between mobile operators should take (currently) no more than two days and from the 1st September this year, this figure drops to 2 Hours. No such targets are mentioned regarding fixed line services.

What we find interesting is that the grief felt within the VoIP world i.e. slow, inefficient and complicated porting has largely been ignored. Once a number ‘has’ been ported, it’s great to know that all the service providers will be mandated to update their routing tables; something that has always surprised us as having been done on a purely goodwill bases in the past.

The criticism surrounding fixed line porting is the process involved, which appears to have grown out of all proportion to what’s actually being done. The losing operator can make the gaining operator jump through a whole sets of procedures before the go-a-head is given for a particular port.

In any VoIP service description, the porting process which addresses who does what and the multitude of reasons for why it might be rejected does not make for light reading. In fact in our experience, those new service providers that do not factor in the administrative effort required for porting are working under an illusion with the hard reality waiting just around the corner.

The losing operator will often justify the seemingly over-complicated process by pointing out that they too are safeguarding the customer’s service, as a failed port or a even a successful one which leaves the customer wondering what happened to their broadband or other network services, should rightly be considered. What happens in reality however is that the cards are stacked against the gaining operator, a lengthy and complicated process that provides numerous opportunities for the losing operator to reject the port.

With such a partisan approach, we wonder whether Ofcom and the UKPorting group should not be spending just a little time on creating a one-stop shop for all fixed line porting requests, as an independent entity. In this way, the industry would benefit from clarity of approach, be able to offer back to back SLAs and remove the suspicion (justified or otherwise) that not all parties are playing fair.