Dirty tactics

ADSL South Africa (Broadband South Africa), 28 January 2007

Both MTN and Vodacom seem to be employing dirty tactics in the number portability war. Cell C customers seem to receive the most abuse in this regard.

By now many South Africans if not most know about ‘number portability.’ Cell C has done a great deal in terms of advertising to deliver the message. In short, ‘number portability’ is the name for the service where you can switch between various cellular service providers without losing your number. In other words, it’s not like in the past, when the possibility of losing your number, influenced your decision whether to switch from one service provider to another or not. While it’s true that ‘only one in every 1521 cellphone users has bothered with number portability, with close to 35 million ignoring it’ (Cell users ‘punished’ for switching, Lesley Stones, Business Day, 24 January 2007), it doesn’t mean that its not a service driven by nobility in the sense of a service that caters for the common good.

So what’s the problem?

There’s no problem with number portability in itself but with the way some players want to suppress it. Both MTN and Vodacom ‘had no incentive to let customers defect and were using delaying tactics to retain them’ (Cell users ‘punished’ for switching, Lesley Stones, Business Day, 24 January 2007). Jeffrey Hedberg, Cell C’s CEO has summed it up beautifully: “If the dominant operators can stifle change it’s good for their bottom line, so there is no great incentive for our two friendly dominant operators to provide an easy porting experience. There are tactics being deployed to make it difficult for customers to port” (Cell users ‘punished’ for switching, Lesley Stones, Business Day, 24 January 2007).

I’m a MTN or Vodacom customer and don’t like what I’m reading. Well, give me an example of the so-called ‘dirty tactics’?

Fair enough.

Hedberg provides an example: “If a customer wants to port they are immediately disconnected and it takes two to three days for the porting process to take place, so the customer is without a phone” (Cell users ‘punished’ for switching, Lesley Stones, Business Day, 24 January 2007).

In other words, if you want to port from MTN or Vodacom to Cell C you can expect to be cut off for a few days.

Why can I expect to be cut off for a few days? 

‘The losing networks failed to hand over the necessary information’ (Cell users ‘punished’ for switching, Lesley Stones, Business Day, 24 January 2007). In other words, both MTN and Vodacom are in a sense guilty of withholding information by failing to hand it over in time.

ADSL South Africa(Broadband South Africa) deplores any efforts to derail number portability since it will only help to place unjust restrictions on decent South Africans.