GNP: Another name for consumer choice
For many people, the concept of geographic number portability (GNP) holds very little meaning – in large part because its benefits to consumers in particular have not been clearly communicated. Also, for people who do have some idea of how GNP works, there is a sense that it benefits businesses rather than consumers. Some simply dread the assumed inconvenience of change. So, the idea of being able to change your landline service provider without having to change your number seems less than exciting.
In fact, geographic number portability (GNP) will finally give power over the telecommunications service provider market to the consumer – and it is hassle free.
It will allow South Africans to easily move from a fixed line service provider they don’t like or that hasn’t – or can’t – give them the service they want to one that can. That’s a freedom that South Africans have never had.
They’ve had a taste of it with mobile number portability, but haven’t really exploited it – mostly because it’s so very easy and cheap to buy a new sim card.
Changing one’s landline number, however, feels more difficult because, usually, one has had it for a long time and most of the people who are important to one know it. Changing all that is a hassle. On the commercial front, organisations have usually invested considerable sums in printing their landline numbers on business cards and marketing material. So changing the landline number is not just troublesome, it can be very costly.
Being able to change landline service providers without having to change your telephone number is, therefore, profoundly important. It gives consumers the means to choose the rates and services they prefer. And it gives businesses the same choice without their having to incur unnecessary costs and potential loss of customers.
Rates are important, obviously. Everyone would like to pay less for a call than they are now. Or, that they know their friends, family, and colleagues overseas are paying.
Variety of services is just as important. Fixed line users in this country have only recently had the option, through us, of having converged telecommunications services as well as modularised services. By convergence, of course, we mean having voice, Internet, and data on one line. And by modularised services, we mean, the ability to easily add digitally-based services as and when an organisation needs them. For example, a small business may choose to buy only voice services at first and then add a virtual private network later, when it is ready to go that route.
Without GNP, users can get such flexibility only if they change their landline number – because they have to change from the incumbent telecommunications operator to us. With GNP, changing service providers is no longer a self-punishing exercise!
There is, of course, also the great irony that, again through us, subscribers will this year have access to four international undersea fibre cables, which will give them unprecedented levels of bandwidth and access speeds while increasing reliability and stability of service.
To avail themselves of that capacity, however, they have to take the relatively onerous step of changing their landline number in order to become a Neotel customer. GNP will resolve that.
It will give both consumers and organisations benefits on another level, too.
Because GNP will make it easy for users to change service providers, it will force fixed line providers to tighten up their game – both in terms of their rates and the types and variety of services they provide. That will not only drive prices down, it will also force all landline service providers to offer the full spectrum of services. South Africans will then have access to all the service choices that the Americans and Europeans have been taking for granted for many years.
All of which will have the effect of refreshing our economy because, finally, we’ll be able to compete as to bandwidth, speed, services, and call rates on equal terms with our international peers.
It’s vital, therefore, that public pressure ensures that the deadline of mid-2010 for implementation of GNP set by the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) is met. There is resistance by some of the important players in the market who fear loss of revenue from subscribers who move to other providers. It’s up to consumers to insist that they be given the choices that millions of people in the rest of the world have counted on for decades.
There is an argument being used by some of the service providers that introducing GNP without local loop unbundling (LLU) doesn’t help the consumer and South African business all that much.
It is true that LLU is the last of the barriers to true telecommunications competition in South Africa, because Telkom owns all the copper cable that has been laid to homes and businesses in the decades in which it has been the telecommunications monopoly in this country.
So, if a user wants to switch landline service providers, the new service provider has to lay new cable to the user’s house or home. That’s not particularly difficult. It just takes time to schedule and then implement. For that reason, unless a subscriber choose to move to a wireless (not to be confused with mobile) service, we’re not quite in the position of Americans and Europeans who can switch providers this morning and have a new service this afternoon.
Local loop unbundling will address that by ensuring that what is known as the last mile of existing cable can be used by any service provider and isn’t the sole property of one organisation.
That legislation is now on the table. It’s a matter of time only before the local telecommunications industry is completely open to competition.
In the meantime, however, GNP is within our grasp. It’s the second last step in the process of freeing up the market and, for the sake of the economy, everyone who has a landline telephone needs to push government hard to activate it.
LLU will be the final step and is the logical outcome of GNP. But, to get LLU, we must get GNP first.
GNP and consumer choice << discussion
* Dr Angus Hay is Neotel executive head: technology. This column was first published on Moneyweb
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