Digicel questions logic of number portability, calls for cost-benefit analysis

Caribbean telecoms regulators should do a cost-benefit analysis of number portability before mandating operators to implement it, regional operator Digicel's head of telecoms public policy, Julian Wilkins, told BNamericas. Speaking about the issue at The Caribbean Association of National Telecommunications Organizations' (CANTO) annual trade fair in Suriname last week, Wilkins raised questions about the logic of implementing number portability in small countries, given the technology's high costs for such markets. "Digicel feels that mobile NP is very expensive to implement and in the essence, Who pays for your costs? You're trying to cover a small population," Wilkins said. He drew attention to countries that have implemented NP in Latin America, such as Ecuador, where within a year of installing NP less than 0.5% of mobile subscribers ported their numbers. In Ecuador, subscribers are entitled to porting twice a year at no cost. In Peru, the demand for porting numbers was less than 0.4% in the first 12 months. And China recently announced it was delaying NP projects because they were not seeing the demand, Wilkins said. "The latest trends show that there is very little demand for NP," Wilkins said. He said Digicel research had found that mobile users tend to put less and less importance on phone numbers as a way of keeping in contact, as email and social networks have become the predominant ways to communicate. But retaining numbers is important to the corporate community, as fixed voice calls are still an important means of contact for customers. The Eastern Caribbean Telecommunications Authority (ECTEL) produced a consultancy paper in June stating its intention to introduce NP for fixed-to-fixed line calls and postpaid mobile-to-mobile, but not for prepaid mobile-to-mobile. "They did a survey before talking about implementing NP and found that 87% of small businesses said it was important to keep their fixed-line numbers. But for prepaid customers the retention of a specific number was not a priority in maintaining a relationship with any particular provider," Wilkins said. He underscored that some 95% of the Caribbean's mobile population is prepaid and that most people have handsets from two or more operators to take advantage of on-net rates. "It's nice to see a regulator actually doing a survey to look at demand. Other regulators like in Trinidad are just plowing ahead and not doing any demand survey or cost-benefit analysis. Is it in the public interest to introduce something like this?" Wilkins said. The Digicel executive argued that NP is more justifiable in markets with multiple operators, whereas most Caribbean nations have only two. He also said the technical aspect of implementation is complex; for example, the UK and Switzerland took 17 and 29 months, respectively.