Peter Griffin: Time for action on number portability

COMMENT


When Telecom brought in its $10 a month flat-rate texting plan, I bet there were tens of thousands of Vodafone customers who'd have jumped ship to Telecom were it not for two things: Telecom's still under-par handset range, and the fact that they'd have had to sacrifice their 021 phone number to do so.

On the other hand, I'm sure there are thousands of businesses out there who, for various reasons, would be ditching Telecom and signing up for Vodafone if they didn't have to repaint the sign on the side of the van, change the business cards and tell everyone they have a new mobile.

Vodafone has the lion's share of the mobile market these days - 57 per cent or more.

You'd think, then, that Telecom and Vodafone would be equally in favour of this supposedly vexing thing called mobile number portability - a system which allows customers to take their 021, 025, 027 or 029 mobile number with them as they change supplier.

After all, just about every other OECD country has mobile number portability, allowing people in the United States, Australia, Britain, and a host of other nations to repay shoddy service by dumping their provider and moving to a competitor. There are enough overseas examples now of how to efficiently, and as cheaply as possible, tinker with the telephone networks to allow this liberating thing to happen here.

Neither Vodafone nor Telecom openly say they are opposed to number portability of the mobile or fixed line flavour, but it's obvious neither wants it.

As one cynical industry veteran pointed out to me, why would Telecom be shelling out millions on its GO27 campaign if the number you own is likely to be meaningless in the near future?

The carriers want to retain that barrier to change, at least until third-generation networks are up and running and consumers get a taste of a range of new services that will keep them inert.

That was made pretty clear last week with the comments of Telecom's chief operating officer, Simon Moutter, who took the floor at a telecoms industry summit in Wellington to tell his audience not to expect number portability until Telecom introduced its advanced new network - something that could take years to complete.

Moutter said delivering number portability for fixed-line and mobile phones would cost "tens of millions of dollars" with Telecom's current network.

He then answered criticism from a banking executive in the audience about a lack of progress on number portability by pointing out it was not possible to take your bank account with you as you changed banks.

That's true, but the comparison is stupid.

While Telecom is working on a precursor to number portability, a form of call-forwarding that it hopes to introduce next year, Moutter's comments show the level of enthusiasm Telecom has for the overall idea and therefore the speed at which the project will proceed.

Just as disheartening were comments from Malcolm Alexander, an electricity industry veteran and head of the Telecommunications Carriers' Forum - a body made up of Telecom, Vodafone and other telecoms players trying to "self-regulate" themselves into introducing number portability.

He told the audience that, even if his forum did agree on a "mandatory code" for number portability, it wasn't legally enforceable, strictly speaking. The forum, in essence, relies on the goodwill of its members, who are voluntary anyway, and requires 75 per cent consent for many resolutions to be passed.

The lack of enforceability of codes is a big oversight on someone's part, considering legislation called for the setting up of the forum.

"The ideal solution would be a legislative change to allow for enforceability of approved regulated codes," Alexander was yesterday quoted in the trade press as saying.

Despite that, his hackles were raised when the forum was criticised as being toothless.

Alexander appears to be doing the best he can and the forum has been working on number portability for less than a year. With a pitiful amount of funding and half-hearted support from his biggest members, you can't criticise his progress too much.

But as I walked out of a meeting with him last week, I was thinking exactly the same thing. The forum, for all its good intentions, is toothless.

And with the Commerce Commission, which in March last year began an investigation into number portability, effectively handling this slippery ball back to Alexander, hopes for a fast-tracking of the number portability process seem to be fading.

The industry's small players, acknowledge that introducing number portability will take some time - "six months to a year" according to some estimates. We as consumers can stomach that, but the fact is, we should have had number portability years ago - it has been discussed and debated for most of a decade.

It's time for some independent, accurate research to be produced on the real costs of introducing number portability and the Government to take action in an area where self-regulation clearly is not working.

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