Carrier Pre-Select

[Deenem]

There was a little snippet in the Business Report this morning about Mobile Carrier Pre-Select. It was a little vague on details, but what it seemed to imply is that your SIM card would no longer be tied to a single service provider.
You could recharge with a VC voucher and have it recharge you VC pre-pay account, then recharge with an MTN voucher without having to swap SIM's. You would switch providers simply by selecting a different network from your phone. Could be useful to select the cheapest call rate at different times. No use to contract subsribers, unless you want to add pre-pay data bundles instead of contract bundles.

At least that what it sounded like to me. Can anyone confirm that I am on the right track?

Of course, the focus of the article was all about the little MTN piggy who was squealing at the top of it's lungs because it didn't want to share it's trough with anyone else. Seriously, if you ever start dating someone as insecure as the average cell phone company, walk away very slowly and make sure they have no way of contacting you afterwards.

 

[dominic]

sort of on the right track ...

ICASA is considering carrier pre-select regulations but
1. these will struggle to be useful in the absence of price regulation around interconnect (termination) and call origination charges
2. ICASA intends to exclude mobile providers from carrier pre-select (they will, as things currently stand, only be required to offer carrier select)

Carrier Select (CS): you select the voice provider you want to use on a call by call basis. Usually you will dial a specified prefix before the number you want to call. E.g. you are a telkom subscriber but want to use Neotel to carry an international call because it is cheaper (say)....so you dial the code for Neotel (say...."79") and then the number

Carrier Pre-Select (CPS): your choice of voice provider is effected at network level. E.g. you are a telkom subscriber and you enter a deal with Neotel to use their network for your voice calls. Neotel interact with Telkom and the "79" prefix is entered on the network side so you don't have to dial it. Note that you can still override this and enter a prefix which will allow you to use telkom's network if you want to

 

[Deenem]

Thanks, not quite what I thought it was then.

Would have been really useful for data traffic, suppose VC's network is down you just switch over to MTN.