Paul Brislen: Waiting for number portability

COMMENT

My home phone has stopped working. My wife rang Telecom and was told yes, there was a problem with the line and it might take a couple of days to sort out.

As an interim measure, the help-desk offered to divert all incoming calls to my wife's cellphone. She pointed out she had a Vodafone phone, but that was no problem.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you number portability. Everything else is window dressing. This is what people want when they say "number portability" - the ability to have calls sent to one number answered at another. So why is it that after nearly a decade of broken promises, meetings, delayed roll-outs and all the rest of the nonsense, we're still being told number portability is too hard and can't be done? Telecom is clearly able to do it right now and is doing it when it sees fit.

Obviously this call-forwarding kind of solution isn't full number portability. When the call arrives on my wife's phone it's devoid of metadata known as caller line ID or CLI. She doesn't get told who's calling.

If we could do that today I'd be happy with that as a service. When my home phone rings at the moment I don't have a clue who's calling. I don't want to pay extra money per month for the additional services at Telecom's current rate and yet somehow I'm quite happy with my phone as it operates today. I like caller ID on my cellphone and with the ihug phone service I've been playing with I can get voice mail, call forwarding and call waiting for $7.95 a month, but I could live without it if I could keep my Telecom phone number when I switch to another provider.

This is one of those services that benefits consumers and business users alike. It opens up competition because losing your phone number is one of the biggest barriers to moving between providers.

That's why Telecom and Vodafone are so reluctant to implement it. Telecom tells us its new network will allow real number portability and we should wait for its launch. I say if we can do this kind of call forwarding today, let's get on with it.

Once the new network with all its smarts is in place then we can talk again about full number portability. We're one of the last countries in the OECD to be without number portability and I don't buy the "it's too hard" argument.

If the industry cannot agree to a solution then a solution needs to be agreed on for it.

The Commerce Commission needs the ability to step in on something as obvious as number portability and say "time gentlemen, please" and stop the madness.

The Telecommunications Act does not allow the commissioner to do that, apparently, so that will be one of the key areas the minister will need to look into with his proposed review of the act.

While we're reviewing the act, the minister must also finally come out and tell us what he's going to do about the Kiwi Share, now called the Telecommunications Share Obligation (TSO).

Several months ago he raised the spectre of tendering out the regional TSO commitments to avoid the ludicrous situation of having Vodafone paying Telecom millions of dollars to compete with Telecom.

CallPlus has split its business in two to avoid paying the TSO tax and other fun and games are sure to emerge unless the minister gets involved.

He's asked the Ministry of Economic Development for advice, so now it's over to him to come out with a new Telco Act to match.

Whether we see that before an election is the big question.

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