Number portability and value-added services

Number portability gives South African consumers greater choice of network provider while retaining one's cellphone number. This is good news for consumers. Yet, says Dr Pieter E Streicher, MD of BulkSMS.com, consumers should realise that at this stage, a change of network does not mean the seamless continuation of value-added mobile services offered by wireless application service providers (WASPs).

28 Nov 2006

"Network preference can be swapped without losing your cellphone number. What you may lose is the ability to reply to messaging services supported by WASPs. There is a concern that certain value-added mobile services do not work after you have ported," explains Streicher.

Number portability could affect a range of mobile services. These value-added services include: subscription services, location-based services, interactive competition and voting lines, mobile clubs, SMS dating and reply stop message functions.

"Ideally, when a consumer ports their cellphone number to a new network provider, they should be able to access all the mobile messaging services they are used to receiving," asserts Dr Streicher.

The following examples point to some of the problems with number portability:

A consumer joins a location-based service and wishes to track the location of a family member. This involves a confirmation request sent to the family member via SMS. If the family member has a ported number, a problem arises when he or she attempts to reply to the message. The "message originator" is still linked to the original network provider and the new network will drop the reply message as it does not recognise the "message originator" number.
All subscription services are lost at porting and consumers would need to re-subscribe to use the service again.
Consumers with ported numbers will be unable to reply with "stop" to unwanted messages.

"As far as we can see, the uptake of number portability has been quite slow but may well increase as soon as there is an increase in consumer confidence in the porting process. For the time being, consumers would be wise to wait until all mobiles services can be seamlessly ported between networks," advises Dr Streicher.