It has been one year since the Federal Communications Commission ordered carriers to allow customers to churn and take their phone numbers with them.
The FCC said Wednesday that twice as many people-more than 8.5 million-participated in wireless local number portability in its inaugural year than participated in wireline LNP during its first year.
The FCC’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau said the number of customers participating in LNP has been steadily increasing to a monthly average of 720,000 wireless-to-wireless ports. The numbers have also increased monthly for intermodal porting from less than 3,000 in December 2003 to 165,000 in June. The intermodal figure dropped to 143,000 in July, the last month that detailed numbers are available.
While it typically takes less than three hours to port between wireless carriers, customers wishing to cut the cord-almost 10 percent of the wireless LNP ports were from wireline numbers-must wait days for the process to be completed. The FCC recently proposed reducing the time it takes to port from wireline service to wireless from four days to just more than two days-from 96 hours to 53 hours.
