Vodafone’s legal challenge to fast porting.
I tried to open some dialogue with colleague members of the ITSPA about Vodafone’s legal challenge to Ofcom’s two-hour number port ruling. Instead I got a number of offlist replies suggesting Vodafone’s challenge is still news to many in the industry.
Today, if you want to port your number from one service provider to another, it relies on two major coincidences - firstly that your old and new provider have an agreement in place to manage the technical transfer between the two networks, and secondly that your old provider remains fully willing to forward all calls destined from your old number, to your new service provider.
There are several issues with such a system - the first is that your old provider are still very much involved, so their technical or commercial failure causes a problem long after you have ported away, another is that the process is slow and manual, and a third is that not all service providers have agreements to permit number porting (called a Mutual Porting Agreement in the industry).
Vodafone are concerned about the costs of the new system, even though an industry group UKPorting has only just begun to gather information about how the system should work. I think that it’s a flawed premise to argue that a system is too expensive before a system is selected (and associated costs are announced). Instead Vodafone should get involved with designing a perfect system.
The UKporting system to facilitate fast, reliable, and simple porting must happen, and must succeed. We have to protect consumers who port their number from failures caused by their former service provider.
I am concerned that the system may mean all multihomed telephone networks will need to move to any all-call-query model that’s run by one natural monopoly. If a single entity holds the industry to ransom, we have not moved forward - there’s still a single commercial or technical position that can fail to break your port. The single All-Call-Query model also lends itself well to governments having access to a single point where recording of most call attempts can be made.
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