South African call centres can soon move 0800-numbers away from Telkom — here’s how it works
South African businesses can finally port non-geographic numbers without losing the mobile or fixed-line numbers.
From 7 March 2022, these businesses will be able to shift their often heavily-advertised numbers away from Telkom after 16 years of number portability being partially implemented.
Number portability has bolstered competition in the telecoms space. On average, 72,000 mobile numbers were ported each month from November 2006 to January 2022 — a total of 13.5 million numbers.
For geographic numbers, the average number of ports per month is over 18,700 from April 2010 to January 2022.
“Things are moving in SA telecoms,” regulatory advisor to South Africa’s Internet Service Providers’ Association (ISPA), Dominic Cull, said.
“Now, businesses from neighbourhood mom and pop concerns with easily-remembered numbers emblazoned on their shopfront windows to large corporates that have spent large amounts of money on helping millions more customers remember their incoming numbers can easily switch telecoms providers.”
Supporting the process is the Number Portability Company (NPC), established by South African telecommunications players such as MTN, Vodacom, Cell C, Telkom, Neotel, and Liquid Intelligent Technologies.
The NPC always facilitates number ports.
While private customers can port their numbers using a prepaid SIM and following the instructions on the network’s starter pack, the process for porting 0800, 086, and 087 numbers is more complex.
Porting these numbers also takes considerably longer. According to the ISPA, it can take up to three working days for one or more non-geographic numbers or up to ten working days for blocks of 100, 1,000, or 10,000 consecutive non-geographic numbers.
The first step of the non-geographic number porting process is a “Porting Mandate” that instructs the new network to begin porting the numbers away from the current provider.
This must be correctly completed, signed, and submitted to the recipient network together with relevant supporting documentation.
After the notification is received from the NPC that the numbers are ready to port, the new network will request a preferred porting date from the customer.
Porting begins in the evening of the port date, and by 08:00 the following day, providers across South Africa should have updated their call routing based on the NPC database.
It is important to note that porting timeframes depend on the donor network releasing numbers timeously. The new network also has no contact with, or influence over, the releasing network.
The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) published the framework for non-geographic number porting on 15 December 2021 and announced a commencement date of 7 March 2022.
Loading ...