THE Nigerian telecommunications industry regulator,
Nigerian Communications Commission has said that it has no plan to dump the
Mobile Number Portability (MNP) which it introduced two years ago to tackle the
problem poor network quality.
The Commission said that the exercise has come
to stay noting that the fact the NCC has not release any statistics on the
numbers of porting done so far by the operators does not mean it has jettison
the project.
Head of Public Relations, Mr. Reuben Muoka in an
interview with ICT-BIZAFRICA while
reacting to recent speculations that the Commission has abandoned the project
since there are no statistics on the numbers of porting done so far noted that
the release of statistics on porting is the discretion of the NCC.
According to him, the NCC cannot be said to have
aborted the project while it is still running advert on the radio, television
and the newspaper saying that people can only speculate if they have gone to
any operator and they were told that they are no longer offering porting
service.
He stated further that Number Portability is by choice
and the Commission has introduced it to address the challenges in the industry
stressing that there was no way the NCC can abort it without informing the
subscribers.
Muoka noted that it is not the culture of the NCC to
abandon a project midway saying, “If we want to do something we will do it, and
if we do not want to do we will not do it. The information we put in the
frequently asked question states that nobody can refuse you porting.”
He also said that the suspension of the sale of SIM
card, which was part of the sanction melted on erring operators: Airtel, Glo
and MTN should not be interpreted to mean an end to Number Portability.
When the MNP was proposed by the NCC there was stiff
opposition to the project the operators, who see as plot to deplete their
subscriber base, which they often used to rate each other.
The
Nigerian Communications Commission therefore instituted investigation into the
issue to ensure that MNP was a success.
A
MNP Clearing House was setup supervise the exercise, and statistics released
few months later by the NCC showed that Emerging Markets Telecommunication
Services, otherwise known as Etisalat, had been the greatest beneficiary of the
porting scheme.
Etisalat
received 44 per cent of all the subscribers that ported in the month of May,
2013. By June figure went up by 50 per cent.
While
in May, Airtel received 29 per cent of the subscribers that ported with an
increase of 12 per cent in the month of June.
For
Glo Mobile, in May the number that ported with was 17 per cent of the total
number, and went up to 29 per cent in the month of June.
The
porting performance chart for MTN in May was 10 per cent of subscribers that
ported to other networks.
The
figure, which was not a cherry news to most industry stakeholders send a wrong
signal to the operators.
A
source close to one of the operators said that the report was not well received
by the operators saying that the reactions from quarters may have prevented the
NCC from further release of the statistics.
However,
rather than further release of more result, the NCC relax the Key Performance
Indicator(KPI) for the industry but later announced at the Association
Telecommunications Company of Nigeria (ATCON) stakeholders forum that it will
beginning implementation of the KPI in 2014.
The
result was the recent sanction that was lashed on three of the operators,
Glo,MTN and Airtel.
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