Dear Gamma Telecom,
Please allow me to congratulate you on many things. You were once small but are now large. Your network is vast, and now has many products, resellers and customers, and has also grown at such a rate that you are “one of the big ones”.
Hearty congratulations too on being so successful that your network is trusted upon by so many people to deliver the products that they depend upon.
However, congratulations definitely need to be passed for building a tier 1 network so complicated that there is one aspect of it in particular that is the absolute bane of my life – porting numbers away from your network for your resellers and end users.
I work for an ITSP that has seen number porting evolve considerably over the last 10 years. I personally have a mixed experience of the last two years. I know some of the tricks to getting some numbers ported, who’s built what numbers on what networks, and some of the pitfalls in service establishment as well. However, in all my time and experience no network operator has made number porting from a network quite so complicated and painful as yours has – not even BT is this complex!
The main bone of contention I have with your network could be summarised in the following scenario: consider a customer (be it a supplier, reseller or end-user) who for various reasons decides they do not wish to continue using Gamma Telecom for their IP telephone service. They have a few customers from their supplier, who contracts the services through Gamma. They also have established numbers over the years on business cards, directory enquiries, business listings and advertising from your vast allocation of number ranges, and thus wish to port the numbers to their new provider rather than take new ones.
In theory this seems very simple – often the hardware they use to receive their IP calls can be configured for our service. They are impressed by the ease of use, the friendly support staff and the great call quality, and after trialling for a short period wish to go ahead with porting their numbers.
Here is where simplicity ends. Wave “bye-bye” as it flies out the window. We then open the biggest most complexly encrypted and encoded book for the next task – porting their numbers from Gamma Telecom.
We submit the initial request. Often what happens is that the numbers are not single numbers, they’re part of a multi-line setup according to the rejection reason. Then what happens is that we find the postcode allocated to the numbers is incorrect. It could be one of (insert chain of resellers supplying and contracting services from Gamma here)-many different values which then has to be deduced, thus causing further delays to the what-should-be-simple porting process. Then your systems aren’t automated like BT or Virgin Media, so an actual human being has to go through and check the export request has the correct information. Because of this lack of automation there is often significant delay whilst we await a response from Gamma, which further increases your customer’s opinions of you.
Then, and this is the most annoying and frustrating part, we are told (as the gaining provider) that the numbers we put on the porting request are insufficient – that there are MORE NUMBERS associated with the main number. We didn’t know about this, nor does our customer. But hold on, they only wish to port certain numbers (in this example, say they want to port 4 numbers in area code 020), but you as the network operator say that there’s more built in this particular range, that we have to declare them on the porting request so that we have at least a remote chance of getting the request accepted.
Here’s the rub, at least from where I stand and view your network’s tower with binoculars:
Telephone numbers have moved on since the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. VoIP is now an established business – telephone numbers are separate to the number of phones they may have. People now expect to be able to port their numbers easily and efficiently in the event they want to change their service provider. People taking service from an ITSP now expect to be able to pick their own numbers from the available choices the ITSP has. By rights they should also be built without unwanted complexity.
In my experience, no tier 1 network has unfortunately made porting more complicated, painful, uncompromising and seemingly antiquated than Gamma Telecom (yes, not even BT – go figure!) No tier 1 network unfortunately makes it so difficult to export their numbers that are service established than Gamma Telecom.
More of the ports I handle on a day-to-day are also from Gamma Telecom. All I’m asking is for you, dear Gamma, to make my porting tasks just a little bit easier:
-> try only letting me port the numbers I actually need for my customers rather than having to declare all the numbers, including those they (or their reseller) mysteriously discover, then decides they don’t need or want
-> build them as single numbers rather than “blocks” that are seemingly randomly allocated to resellers or end-users. (I know of one tier 1 network that does this and it makes it so much easier to port numbers from them!)
-> please (I really can’t stress that word enough) make it easier to work with you to transfer our customer’s numbers from your network!!!
In short, porting is at times a nightmare, inviting a world of pain among those who bravely decide to take the plunge. All I want in an environment where number portability is a pitfall and a privilege, not a right, is for the road to be made easier, one step at a time. Mobile networks frankly have it easy with PACs and 2-day lead times.
This is an open letter to Gamma Telecom from the support engineer of an ITSP. Any views expressed in this open letter are mine, and mine alone, and do not represent those of my employer.
