Local number portability reality set in last week when early industry initiatives to accomplish the porting process in less than three hours quickly fell by the wayside as many customers have been forced to wait days and in some cases more than a week until their wireless numbers were ported successfully to their new carriers.
While the porting timeframe was only a guideline set by the Federal Communications Commission with little dissension from the industry, most operators are now readjusting their initial porting guidelines in hopes of setting new customer expectations.
“Everything’s moving ahead,” said T-Mobile USA spokesman Bryan Zidar. “It hasn’t always been as smooth as we would have liked, but we are working with the other carriers to smooth the process.”
Zidar added the carrier’s stores are telling people the process could take between three and seven days in an attempt to set proper customer expectations.
Most of T-Mobile USA’s competitors have made similar adjustments, though some are holding out hope that as the process matures they eventually will be able to accomplish most ports within the original guidance.
Verizon Wireless, which many analysts noted was seeing the greatest influx of number porting requests, said it was not setting any specific porting time frames for its customers and instead was taking into account a list of factors, including which day a port is initiated and the carrier with which it is porting.
A rash of service level agreements signed by carriers prior to the Nov. 24 LNP deadline and not required by the FCC provided mixed results.
“SLAs were a good guide path, but reality has set in,” said Verizon Wireless spokesman Jeffrey Nelson.
Analysts noted that while they expected porting delays to be an issue, they have been surprised by the extensive nature of the problem despite the fact porting requests were well below most industry estimates.
Bob Egan, Mobile Competency Inc. founder and president, noted that the industry rang up approximately 350,000 porting requests in the first week that it could not handle and has suffered from a constant backlog ever since LNP was implemented. Some analysts originally predicted first-week number porting requests could reach into the millions.
“Even at the low volumes the carriers couldn’t handle it,” Egan said, adding that by last week the industry was accumulating approximately 50,000 new porting requests per day.
RBC Capital Markets noted that just more than half of the 30 number porting requests it was monitoring were accomplished by last Thursday, while Egan said he had not heard of any first-day porting requests that were successful the same day.
Lightbridge Inc., which provides back-end fraud management and call-center support to wireless carriers, said it was experiencing a “slightly busier-than-predicted holiday season,” but that to date LNP-related application volume was indistinguishable from its normal retail season. The company added it was finding calls into its centers were running slightly longer than normal, which it attributed to more inquiries about LNP as opposed to actual porting requests.
Despite the widespread porting issues, analysts noted some carriers are turning out to be more successful in navigating the LNP waters than others.
RBC said in a report last week that Verizon Wireless and Nextel Communications Inc. were the early LNP winners with Verizon Wireless benefiting from its perceived superior network quality and Nextel benefiting from having few porting out requests. Sprint PCS and T-Mobile USA maintained their initial neutral ratings, though both operators are reported to be experiencing greater numbers of customers porting out in select markets.
The biggest losers reportedly continue to be Cingular Wireless L.L.C. and to a greater extent AT&T Wireless Services Inc., which is being singled out as the most affected by LNP. AT&T Wireless, which received a letter from the FCC last week seeking answers to a growing number of consumer complaints, has been suffering since Nov. 1 with network activation problems on its GSM network following a software glitch that is reportedly bleeding over to its LNP processes.
A number of AT&T Wireless dealers have also reported significant porting issues, which combined with the ongoing GSM network activation problems, have “crippled” their business.
Analysts estimated AT&T Wireless’ software issues alone could cost the carrier tens of thousands of net subscriber additions during the usually hectic fourth quarter and have adjusted down their customer growth estimates.
Others note that while some carriers may be seeing larger porting problems than others, there are enough issues throughout the industry for all operators to take some of the blame.
“The problems are not exclusive to one side of the process,” said Roger Entner, program manager of wireless and mobile services at the Yankee Group. “There are problems on both sides in the in-porting and out-porting as well as with both automatic and manual porting processes. Even with much lower-than-expected volume, there is a basic breakdown of the process.”
Entner added that on a positive note it appeared carriers were taking an active approach to fixing the porting issues, but added the results could be too late.
“Carriers are working together to fix the problem, and there has not been any finger pointing or playing of the blame game from the technical people, which is a good thing,” Entner said. “It should get better, but it also should not have reached this point to begin with.”
In addition to fixing the inter-carrier porting problems, operators are expected to face billing issues as customers likely will continue to be billed by their old providers as well as their new providers while waiting for their numbers to successfully port.
“It seems to me that there is a potential windfall in there for carriers,” said Mobile Competency’s Egan.
Many carriers have said they are offering customers credits on their accounts for “unreasonably” long porting times, though most noted the credits were on a case-by-case basis.
“Billing issues are definitely something the industry is going to have to take care of,” said Cingular spokesman Clay Owen.
With a combination of the current porting problems and the potential for future billing concerns, analysts noted the LNP process could provide industry critics with further fuel and lead to stricter government scrutiny of the industry.
“If someone wants to blame the industry, they may now have a case,” Entner said.
