Vodacom offers service provider portability

By Damaria Senne, ITWeb senior journalist

Johannesburg, 20 Nov 2006

Vodacom customers who are unhappy with their service providers, but do not wish to change networks, will soon be able to change service providers without losing their cellphone numbers.

The company confirms it will offer "service provider portability" from today. Unlike Cell C, the mobile provider did not make the service available when mobile number portability (MNP) was implemented on 10 November.

A source associated with Vodacom says the company initially intended that a private process, outside of the MNP process, be used for service provider portability.

The MNP regulations, which govern the process through which operators enable consumers to move to rival networks, do not specifically provide for service provider portability, says an Independent Communication Authority of SA (ICASA) spokesman. The regular will address the issue in the future, he says.

Vanashree Pillay, Cell C's head of corporate communications, notes that mobile service providers were also signatories to the MNP agreement. ICASA made it clear it would be up to the operators to ensure service provider porting took place, she says.

The source notes that Vodacom's technical solution for using the MNP process to facilitate Vodacom service provider portability has not been scoped yet. However, an interim manual process will be used to support Vodacom's service provider portability, he says.

Service provider porting will be available to postpaid, as well as prepaid customers. A subscriber who ports to another service provider will keep his/her SIM card, although postpaid contract holders will have to terminate their old contracts before signing on for new contracts, Vodacom says.

Makhup Nyama, group CEO of Saab Grintek, has previously said the cellphone numbers of on-net porting subscribers would not be included in the database of ported numbers, as the subscribers were not leaving a network. Saab Grintek was appointed to establish the MNP database.

MTN had not responded to queries by the time of publication.