South African companies can lastly port non-geographic numbers with out dropping the cell or fixed-line numbers.
From 7 March 2022, these companies will have the ability to shift their usually heavily-advertised numbers away from Telkom after 16 years of quantity portability being partially carried out.
Quantity portability has bolstered competitors within the telecoms area. On common, 72,000 cell numbers have been ported every month from November 2006 to January 2022 — a complete of 13.5 million numbers.
For geographic numbers, the common variety of ports per thirty days is over 18,700 from April 2010 to January 2022.
“Issues are shifting in SA telecoms,” regulatory advisor to South Africa’s Web Service Suppliers’ Affiliation (ISPA), Dominic Cull, stated.
“Now, companies from neighbourhood mother and pop issues with easily-remembered numbers emblazoned on their shopfront home windows to giant corporates which have spent giant quantities of cash on serving to tens of millions extra prospects keep in mind their incoming numbers can simply swap telecoms suppliers.”
Supporting the method is the Quantity Portability Firm (NPC), established by South African telecommunications gamers reminiscent of MTN, Vodacom, Cell C, Telkom, Neotel, and Liquid Clever Applied sciences.
The NPC all the time facilitates quantity ports.
Whereas personal prospects can port their numbers utilizing a pay as you go SIM and following the directions on the community’s starter pack, the method for porting 0800, 086, and 087 numbers is extra advanced.
Porting these numbers additionally takes significantly longer. In line with the ISPA, it might take as much as three working days for a number of non-geographic numbers or as much as ten working days for blocks of 100, 1,000, or 10,000 consecutive non-geographic numbers.
Step one of the non-geographic quantity porting course of is a “Porting Mandate” that instructs the brand new community to start porting the numbers away from the present supplier.
This have to be appropriately accomplished, signed, and submitted to the recipient community along with related supporting documentation.
After the notification is obtained from the NPC that the numbers are able to port, the brand new community will request a most well-liked porting date from the shopper.
Porting begins within the night of the port date, and by 08:00 the next day, suppliers throughout South Africa ought to have up to date their name routing primarily based on the NPC database.
It is very important notice that porting timeframes rely on the donor community releasing numbers timeously. The brand new community additionally has no contact with, or affect over, the releasing community.
The Impartial Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) revealed the framework for non-geographic quantity porting on 15 December 2021 and introduced a graduation date of seven March 2022.