Cell groups hold SA hostage — Branson
The date when users can switch from one network to another and take their number with them has been pushed back to November 10.
The decision was made by the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa) yesterday after pressure from Vodacom, MTN and Cell C.
The latest request to postpone the agreed date showed they were dragging their heels because it was not in their best interests, said Branson, whose rival service Virgin Mobile entered SA in June.
“They want to lock their customers in,” he said. “You shouldn’t be held hostage by your mobile phone company.”
Virgin Mobile hopes that number portability will help it win more users by freeing up contract customers to defect from the rival networks.
Only 5-million of SA’s 32-million users have a contract tying them to one network but they are generally the high spenders who contribute most of the profits.
Branson is urging customers to write to Icasa and their service provider to lobby for a quicker launch date.
Yesterday Icasa said number portability could launch successfully only after sufficient tests on the system that switches the numbers and tracks the changes.
The authority and the cellphone operators were asking for the indulgence of all stakeholders and consumers for the inconvenience resulting from the extension of the launch, it said.
The new date is a compromise between Cell C’s proposal for the end of October, and MTN and Vodacom seeking a delay until the end of November.
This is the third delay to a service that was supposed to arrive in November last year.
Icasa agreed to a request by the operators to delay it until July this year. Then the operators won another delay, arguing for more time to work out the cost of the system and the cost of switching individual numbers.
The system is understood to have cost them R300m.
When the trio of operators confirmed they would be ready by September 18, Icasa staged a media briefing promising customers an end to the lock-in imposed by the situation of one number on one network.
The latest hold-up came after the operators blamed the late supply of a database. The technically complex service required new business processes to be installed by the operators and service providers, Vodacom said.
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