When is YOUR Telkom number not a Telkom number…?

.... when it’s been ported.

Changing to a VoIP service provider used to mean keeping your existing Telkom lines to receive calls on the number you have always had on your business card and letterhead. That, or opting for an 087 number that half of South Africa probably still thinks belongs to a sex line. No longer. At last count 8 entities were able to port geographic numbers between each other and well over 100,000 landline numbers have been ported between traditional telcos and VoIP service providers in South Africa.

The Altech court case in 2008 that forced ICASA and the DoC’s hands, and allowed every ISP and VANS in SA to get a full telco license had major implications for the SA market that have still not percolated through to consumers. One of those rights is that of the use of a portion of the geographic number range within South Africa. ICASA are cautious about handing out geographical numbers - the remaining ranges are not large, and there are a lot of licensees out there. That is not a constraint though. Once you have a range of geographic numbers, no matter how small, you have the right to participate in Geographic Number Porting.

Most people are aware that it is possible to keep your mobile number and move to another mobile network operator. It is not as well known that the same has been true for landline numbers for some time now. You can keep your Telkom number and move to Neotel, or the likes of MWEB, IS, ECN, Switch Telecom and other alternative telco’s too.

If you’re a VoIP service provider and in possession of an I-ECS license, you should seriously consider jumping though some of the administrative and technical hoops involved to participate in Geographic Number Portability. You’ll need to make adjustments to routing and billing, you’ll need to set up the processes to interact with the Number Portability Company’s CRDB - the central register of ported numbers, which is not trivial, but…. you will find it easier to sell VoIP services AND you will benefit from interconnect revenue from Telkom! If you have a call centre or two on your VoIP service for outgoing calls and they have some significant incoming traffic, you’d need you head examined not to take a good hard look at how much extra revenue you can make from porting their Telkom numbers. [One caveat though - Smartcall numbers are not portable]

It is good to see one more shift towards a more competitive market and lower telecoms costs.

(If anyone needs guidance on the process of setting up and automating GNP - feel free to give me a call)

Telecoms

Comments

[DaveG]

Hey Al,

You'd simply ask ECN to port your number(s) for you, they'd kick off the process via the Number Portability Company's CRDB system, you'd probably get asked by Telkom to confirm it was with your permission that ECN had acted, and then as long as Telkom find no valid reason to refuse , the port would go ahead at 5pm on a date you agree with ECN. Your numbers get added to the CRDB and everyone signed up with the CRDB (including Telkom) forwards calls to you via ECN now instead of Telkom.

Simple in theory - lots of rating, routing and process automation that has to occur to make it potentially simple!

[Alan Levin]

Let's say for example I wanted to port my 021 number from Telkom to ECN, what process would I follow?

[DaveG]

Apologies to those who did not get a mention - I'll address that here. Those operators who are in a position to port geographic numbers include:
Telkom
Neotel
ECN
Switch Telecom
Vox
IS
iBurst (WBS)
MWEB
Multisource
MTNB