At the Telco Day panel discussion today Ernie Newman asked the telcos when they would market number portability.
Telecom CEO Theresa Gattung says they’ve taken a cautious approach to advertising because, after the Go Large fiasco, they wanted to be confident the technology was robust.
Vodafone commercial services GM Tom Chignell said the company is cautious around system stability.
At morning tea I caught up with him about the issue of number portablilty, in particular I was interested in his speech earlier in which he said 80 per cent of their customers are on prepay accounts. Yet prepay customers from Telecom wanting to port Vodafone can’t at the present time do so (see previous Downstream blog).
Chignell says this is likely to change later in the year after Vodafone completes a massive overhaul of their billing systems. Chignell says it involves three countries – New Zealand, Australia and Fiji. The New Zealand system is currently being overhauled. Last week, for example Vodafone NZ completely replaced the number portability suite – the technology they installed to meet the April 1 deadline was just a contingency, says Chignell.
WorldxChange co owner Paul Clarkin, also on the panel, said he welcomed number portability, and in the past 24 hours, they’d processed 70 numbers.
Other questions to the panel were around whether the RMA is still an issue (Telecom and Vodafone say it is), the importance of pricing around LLU and telco separation issues. The final question from NZ Herald journalist Peter Griffin, was directed to TelstraClear CEO Allan Freeth who asked to explain exactly what went wrong with the Unplugged Tauranga network. Dr Freeth declined to comment.