By Simon Woodhead
I haven’t blogged about number portability in a while, largely because it makes me intensely cross! However, I took a look at some stats of relative porting volumes across our agreements, and the results made me really proud. I’m proud of how many new customers our customers are winning, proud of the sheer volume our Operations Team are now handling and how efficient they’ve become, and proud of how few ports out we do which indicates the service level that, between us, end-users are receiving.
Overall, across all our agreements, in November we ported in over 20x as many numbers as we lost the other way. Twenty times!
That masks an even better picture though. Across twelve of our porting agreements, the flow of numbers was entirely one way – 100% into Simwood, with 0% out. And there is no porting agreement where we lost more numbers than we ported in – that is incredible!
The lowest ratio is a wholesale operator that we like and respect and have many many customers in common with – we only ported 11x as many numbers from them as the other way!
From ‘me too’, whose sales droids have been very aggressive towards us directly and our customers (as of course they sell directly as well as through resellers), we ported 315x as many numbers as we lost. If ever validation was needed that the market needs value-added rather than value-torn-apart-by- suited-vultures, this is it. 315x! In fact, this CP competes with BT month-to-month for the top spot as the largest source of new business for our customers.
Turning to BT, they were in November the largest source of incoming ported numbers for us. Now, as the former monopoly, they’ll be most people’s largest source of new business; especially for first-generation ports, so it makes sense. However, BT’s reseller ‘IPX’ product is also the source of much of the unfairness we perceive in porting – their resellers can leverage 100% of BT’s agreements to port in, yet can hide behind a seemingly universal ‘misunderstanding’ of the ability BT provide to port outside of other resellers (i.e. to other operators that are not IPX resellers) and the fact that, even if willing or mentally astute enough to do so, they can only do so once.
If only we had a regulator eh? In the absence of one, and against a tide of what I see as blatant market distortion, the fact our customers are still porting in over 12x as many numbers from BT (and resellers) as are being lost the other way, is brilliant.
These are wonderful ratios to see and bode really well for the growth of Simwood customers, and in turn our own growth! Thank you and well done.
If these stats are of interest to customers going forwards we’re more than happy to share them. Please let us know!
