Mobile Number Portability to take off July 1

Beginning from July 1, 2011, mobile phone users in this country would have the luxury to migrate their entire phone numbers, including the network code 024, 027, 020, 026, 028 or Glo's 02X to any network they choose.

This would be made possible by a system called Mobile Number Portability, which, for instance, allows customers with a 02X number to migrate their number to another network with 02Y code, and vice versa.

The network losing a customer is called the donor and the one gaining the customer is called the recipient.

The National Communications Authority (NCA) and the various network operators have completed more than 90 per cent of the technical work that needed to be done to ensure that MNP takes off smoothly.

Mr. Joshua Peprah is the Director, Regulatory and Administration at the NCA, and he told Adom News that “all is set for the take off of the MNP on July 1, 2011.”

“What this means is that from July first all mobile phone users who have registered their SIM cards but are not happy with their network service provider can migrate to another network but maintain their original phone number including the prefix of the original network,” he said.

He said the NCA has awarded a contract to a private joint-ventureship called Porting Access Ghana (PAG) to establish a central database of all ported numbers and also to facilitate porting within 24 hours.

“The system is such that if you want to port, you go to the new network you want to migrate to (the recipient) and tell them you want to join them and they would inform PAG and PAG would inform the network that you are leaving (the donor) so they can deactivate your number from their network.

“The recipient would then give you a new chip with the same number and pay PAG a standard fee of about $2.5 (equivalent to about GHC4) and you become their customer even though your network code is still that of the donor,” he said.

He says NCA expects that the various networks would absorb the charges, adding that NCA would ensure that there were no overcharges.

Mr. Peprah said during porting, the donor would be given 15 minutes to deactivate the migrated number, but if it doesn't, PAG would still go ahead and inform all networks that the number in question now belongs to another network so all calls and text messages to that number should be routed to the new network.

He said at this stage all the engineers and technical staff of the various telecom service providers have been trained in how to do smooth porting.

“We paired Tigo and Expresso; MTN and Airtel, and Vodafone and Glo to undertake dummy porting exercises and it worked fine – I must say that the various network operators have some of the finest engineers in the industry and they worked hard to make the system very smooth,” he said.

But Mr. Peprah noted that mobile phone users would need to necessarily register their SIM cards before they could participate in MNP because they would require the ID of very individual before his or her number can be ported.

He therefore urged all mobile phone users to register their SIM cards before the June 30, 2011 deadline to avoid losing their phone numbers, saying that “you can't port a number that has been rendered invalid."

Currently the NCA is checking the veracity of the ID cards people used in registering their SIM cards to ensure the authenticity of the IDs.

He said other reasons for which porting can be denied include if the phone number is reported stolen, inactive on the original network, fraud reported about that number or lack of enough ID.

Meanwhile some of the telecom operators have said they are not perturbed by the MNP because in countries where it had happened previously not more than two per cent of phone users ported their numbers.

It is also expected that MNP would reveal the actual numbers of active cell phone numbers in this country, as more than 17 million are being reported and yet not all are active.

Network operators are also expected to start offering lots of freebies between now and July 1, to lure their customers to stay with them when the MNP takes off.

Story by: Samuel Nii Narku Dowuona/