Industry seems ready for P-Day

Most carriers seem to be ready for local number portability, both wireless-to-wireless and wireline-to-wireless. (Not to mention wireless-to-wireline, even though there probably won’t be much call for it.)

“Most of the carriers have deployed or configured solutions necessary to meet this date, and they’re going to think about optimizing them later if the volume of portability becomes more than they thought,” said Arun Handa, vice president of engineering at Intellinet Technologies, a developer of front-end signaling software for converged SS7, IP and ATM signaling networks.

Handa pointed out that wireline carriers and their employees actually have the systems and the experience at supporting portability that wireless carriers haven’t needed to develop until now. “As a vendor, the service support you provide the wireless guys during portability will become very important,” he said. “The wireline people have more training in this area.”

Most vendors and consultants that have teamed with wireless carriers to help them prepare for portability report that national carriers have been working for up to two years to ensure a smooth transition to the portability era. Some of this work was technical, such as upgrades to billing systems and other OSS-related platforms. Other work might best be described as legal and political: All of the six largest carriers have forged service level agreements with at least some, if not all, of their Big Six brethren. The SLAs detail rules for carrying out portability, including protocol to follow when glitches occur during the porting processing and require troubleshooting.

“Portability really is shaping up to be less a technical issue than an organizational one, and how organizations will be able to manage change,” said Dave Meredith, vice president at AMS, which provides IT and management consulting to mobile carriers.

In fact, technical readiness is not so much an issue relating to portability, but it will be an issue relating to the new services carriers may support to take advantage of customers’ ability to port.

“Carriers will focus on new services to differentiate their offerings, and increase the barrier of exit for subscribers,” said Elda Rudd, vice president of marketing at 724 Solutions. She added that customizing and personalizing content will help carriers further establish relationships with their customers that will be hard to break.