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NCC to reduce 90-day porting process window

By on August 8, 2013

Three months after launching the mobile number portability scheme for telecoms consumers in Nigeria, the Nigerian Communication Commission is considering reducing the time a subscriber must stay on a network after porting from 90 days.

The commission’s Executive Vice Chairman, Dr. Eugene Juwah, disclosed this Tuesday during a forum orgainsed by the ICT Publishers Alliance in Lagos

He said the mobile portability service would be subjected to constant reviews to see how it can be improved for the benefit of subscribers.

Juwah, who was represented by his Special Adviser on Technical Services, Edoyemi Ogoh, said “the whole objective of mobile portability is to ensure that it keeps improving every day to benefit the subscribers. Already, we have been getting feedbacks and these feedbacks we are getting from subscribers would be incorporated into the porting process to improve the scheme.”

Commenting on the 48-hour time frame to complete the porting process, the EVC noted “that though the porting window is 48 hours, but from information from the operators, the porting process is now being completed within one day maximum.”

The forum revealed that, though the exercise is recording slow but successful progress in terms of the processing of porting requests by interested subscribers, a lot of bottlenecks, which had earlier been pointed out by the stakeholders, have now been acknowledged by the commission.

Our correspondent learnt that other key areas for review include: the level of public education by the NCC; and also how to checkmate alleged denial of quick process of porting request by some operators.

Also speaking at the forum the Chief Operating Officer, Interconnect Clearing House Limited, Uche Onwediwe, agreed on the need to regularly review the porting process, stressing that “already, we are getting feedbacks and the information we are getting from the subscribers is about making the service easy to migrate from the comfort of their home without necessarily going to an operator’s service centre before porting can be done

“Another area is the 90 days required by an operator to keep a ported line on its network before such a number can port back. Right now, the condition is that once you ort to a network, you cannot port to another network again until after 90 days. But I am aware that NCC is working to shorten the number of days. So, we want to see that we modify the process towards making porting more attractive to Nigerian subscribers.”

 

 
[Daily Independent]