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NCC to introduce number mobility across networks

By Everest Amaefule

The Nigerian Communications Commission plans to introduce number portability across the digital mobile networks in the country, the Executive Vice-Chairman of the commission, Mr. Ernest Ndukwe, has said.

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Also the Minister of Information and Communications, Mr. John Odey, has given an indication that subscribers may continue to live with poor telecommunications services till December.

Number portability means that a subscriber to a network can move from one network to another competing operator with the number already allocated to him by the earlier operator.

Ndukwe, who made the disclosure at the fourth-year anniversary of the Consumer Parliament held in Abuja on Friday, said the objective was to raise competition in the industry and keep operators on their toes.

Usually, subscribers are reluctant to move from a network to another, even when they are not satisfied with their current service providers, because of the cumbersome nature of informing their contacts that their numbers have changed.

Some operators have been exploiting this reluctance, refusing to match the offering of competitors in either quality of service or competitive pricing. This attitude is expected to change when number portability is introduced in the market.

The implication of this is that when numbers become portable, a subscriber with MTN Nigeria Communications Limited, for instance, who migrates to Celtel Nigeria could still retain 0803, 0806 or 0703 initially offered by MTN.

Thus, it will no longer be right to conclude that every 0805 number is on the Glo Mobile network or to conclude that every 0802 is on the Celtel network.

Since the regulatory agency in the United States of America mandated mobile number portability in 1996, many other countries have followed suit. Australia introduced the service in 2001 and most countries in Europe introduced it in 2003.

In Europe, the introduction experienced some hiccups as some operators, in a bid to frustrate the innovation, made the process long and tortuous for a subscriber to move with their numbers to another network. The authorities had to intervene to reduce the time frame to not more than 10 days.

At present, it takes about two hours to move a number from one network to another in the US. Numbers can even be moved from a fixed to a mobile network.

Ndukwe also disclosed that a taskforce had been set up to look into the customer care centres of mobile operators in order to determine how effective they were in tackling the complaints of operators.

Ndukwe said the legal department of the regulatory agency had been directed to formulate appropriate sanctions for operators that keep their subscribers waiting at the service centres.

The NCC boss also urged the operators to empower their big distributors to be able to resolve some consumer problems so that every person that had an issue with a network would not need to go to the service centre.

He also disclosed that a regulatory call centre to handle subscriber issues would soon be inaugurated by the agency.

The NCC chief added that the commission was also working with operators to fashion out a compensation plan to be executed whenever an operator fails to deliver to a certain level of service.

At the consumer parliament, Odey, who was the special guest, said operators had been given a deadline to improve their network by the end of December or face sanctions from the regulatory agency.