Much like Al Capone’s vault, the first few days of local number portability provided more hype than headlines as the feared millions of customers beating down the doors of retail outlets selling wireless services in an attempt to switch carriers was tempered by a shortened work week, potential churners more interested in getting ready for Thanksgiving day festivities and possible fear of being the first to attempt an unproven service.
TSI Telecommunications Services Inc., which serves as the primary hub for communications between wireless carriers and the Portability Administration Center and provides various wireless porting elements for five of the top six nationwide wireless carriers, said it processed approximately 80,000 porting requests Nov. 24, and it did not experience any significant problems.
“Considering the magnitude of this industrywide implementation, this is good news,” said TSI Chief Executive Officer Ed Evans.
Similar results were reported by back-end fraud management and call-center provider Lightbridge Inc., which noted one of the few bottlenecks it experienced was in calls from Puerto Rico, which the company attributed to routing calls to Spanish-speaking agents and a local promotion from Cingular Wireless L.L.C. touting a boxing hero porting his number to Cingular. Lightbridge added that first-day call volume was in line with its modest estimates, and a lot of the LNP calls it handled were of the “what it means” variety.
Bob Egan, president and founder of industry consulting firm Mobile Competency, noted that based on telephone surveys and executive interviews, overall store traffic was up between three and four times across all operators on the first day of LNP with peak traffic about eight times higher than normal.
In-store observations and interviews conducted by RCR Wireless News found carrier-branded retail outlets experienced the most customer traffic early last Monday compared with indirect channels, which showed little foot traffic.
While it was not surprising most carriers noted few porting problems last week and were busy touting porting milestones, industry analysts encountered mixed porting success and results that seemed to favor some operators at the expense of others.
Mobile Competency estimated less than 100,000 total porting requests on the first day of availability, but noted most carriers reported porting failures in the 40-percent range.
A similar report from RBC Capital Markets found that of the porting samples it obtained from a variety of carriers, none of the porting requests was completed on the first day, though a handful of the attempted cross-carrier ports began to trickle in by last Wednesday. RBC also reported only partial porting success in caller identification and text messaging services, including ported numbers not appearing correctly displayed on a recipient’s handset and the inability to send or receive text messages from a ported number.
Despite the early troubles, most analysts declared Verizon Wireless and Nextel Communications Inc. the early-number porting winners, Sprint PCS and T-Mobile USA Inc. as neutral, and AT&T Wireless Services Inc. and Cingular as the early-number porting losers.
“Verizon saw four times as many new customers as they lost to porting on day one,” noted American Technology Research telecommunications analyst Albert Lin, who added he thinks the difference will increase this week as the carrier is expected to lower its pricing on popular handsets the day after Thanksgiving in a combined promotion for the holiday sales season and LNP promotion.
Mobile Competency’s Egan noted Nextel took a fair share of business from both Verizon Wireless and Sprint PCS, which he attributed to increasing interest in push-to-talk services.
“We stood in three different Verizon stores and not once did we see a salesperson move a customer anywhere near their PTT phone offering,” Egan said.
Little impact was reported for either Sprint PCS or T-Mobile USA, both of which had introduced aggressive pricing changes prior to the LNP deadline.
Lin and Egan noted T-Mobile USA’s porting process was suffering from occasional glitches, while RBC added that despite longer-than-anticipated porting times from Sprint PCS, the carrier seemed to have a handle on the process.
More concern was generated by AT&T Wireless and to a lesser extent Cingular, which analysts said were seeing a greater number of customers porting out than porting in.
“Our retail checks suggest [AT&T Wireless] and Cingular are comprising a significant portion of outbound porting requests,” noted RBC in a report. “While this is expected given their positions as the second- and third-largest carriers, our sense from talking to independent dealers is that more customers are requesting to port away from rather than port into these carriers thus far.”
RBC added that Cingular’s porting process appeared to be the least efficient, while others noted AT&T Wireless is still feeling the effects of a software glitch from early last month that prevented the carrier from accessing GSM customers’ information or from initiating new customers on its GSM network. AT&T Wireless said last week that it would issue credits to GSM customers affected by the software glitch, which as of last week was still not fully solved.
Hard data on regional operators was hard to come by early last week, with Leap Wireless International Inc.’s CEO Harvey White noting it was too early in the game to produce any clear direction and that he did not expect any concrete data for a couple of weeks.
While the first several days of LNP appeared to produce few surprises, most industry observers expect the big test will be the day after Thanksgiving, which is traditionally one of the busiest shopping days of the year.
“The industry has had three days of breathing room and public beta testing,” said Roger Entner, program manager for wireless and mobile services at the Yankee Group. “Friday is the stress test.”
