Geographic number portability (GNP) has now become a reality, communications network operator Neotel said in a statement on Thursday.
It added that it had been actively working with Telkom to put the processes in place to allow for GNP.
Following an announcement by the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) last month, it was now possible to port blocks of numbers of between 1 000 and 10 000 between the two fixed line operators, Neotel said.
For example, an office block could make use of land-line number portability, but at this stage individuals cannot make use of the service yet.
”When mobile number portability was launched a couple of years ago, the scene was set for the fixed line industry to follow suit,” Neotel added.
”We have been working tirelessly to overcome the technical and legislative hurdles in order to allow for geographic number portability,” said Stefano Mattiello, chief sales and customer care officer at Neotel.
”Tremendous progress has already been made in this regard with block portability becoming a reality and we will continue to drive the process toward individual porting on behalf of the consumer,” he added.
He believed the launch of individual porting would be the birth of true competition in the telecommunications market.
The regulations required that individual porting be in place within 10 months of block porting which was launched in May 2009, Mattiello noted.
He explained that there was a process to be followed when porting a number.
”Customers must put in the request to port … this is then either approved or rejected by their existing service provider.”
There were a number of reasons why a request to port could be rejected, he said, such as an account that was not in good standing, misalignment between the account number and service provided or that the number was a trigger for a smart call number.
”Currently smart call numbers cannot be ported but work is under way to address this gap and customers will eventually be able to port those numbers as well,” Mattiello said. — Sapa