mobile number portability in ghana third year report number portability in ghana - third year report...

Mobile Number Portability

in Ghana

Third Year Report

National Communications Authority

August 26, 2014

Mobile Number Portability in Ghana - Third Year Report – August 26, 2014

1

Key Points

Mobile Number Portabil ity (MNP), a system which allows mobile

subscribers to change from one network to another without changing any

part of their mobile number, was launched in Ghana on July 7, 2011.

By the end of the third year of operation, 1,655,404 porting requests had

been successfully completed since launch. The third year total of 838,202

represents an 87% increase over the second year.

The total number of completed ports from launch until 30 th June 2014 is

approximately 6% of the total active mobile numbers in Ghana. This far

exceeds any other MNP implementation in sub -Saharan Africa.

While each of the mobile networks in Ghana have gained and lost

customers through porting, at the end of the 3 r d year two networks were

showing a net gain from porting and four were showing a net loss.

The speed of processing porting requests has increased signif icantly. In

June 2014, the average time to complete the porting process after request

submission was 4 minutes, 16 seconds. 91% were completed in 5 minutes

or less and 67% were completed in 2 minutes or less.

Statistics indicate that most customers who ported were satisf ied with

their decision. 72% of the numbers which were ported during the f irst

three years remain ported.

The success rate of porting requests submitted was 81% in the third year,

varying between 75% and 85% o n a monthly basis . However, a signif icant

percentage of the request which did not succeed were spurious and were

not related to actual customers attempting to port.

The central MNP system and the counterpart sys tems at each network

continue to function generally well, and service disruptions are detected

quickly and relevant personnel notif ied by the late response alert system.

During the third year, approximately 5 out of every 1,000 porting requests

were reversed on the basis that the porting request should not have taken

place for a variety of reasons. Systems are being implemented to better

detect those responsible and to reduce this already low rate.


2

Statistics

In the third year of MNP in Ghana ending July 6, 2014, 838,202 porting

requests were completed successful ly. This is an 87% increase over the

447,095 requests completed in the second year. The compound annual growth

of completed porting requests is 50.5%.

The cumulative total number of requests completed since launch in 2011 was

1,655,404, which represents approximately 6% of the total act ive mobile

numbers in the market . Note that due to duplication in the methodology for

counting total active mobile numbers and the fact that many Ghanaian

customers have more than one account and number, the percentage of actual

individuals who have taken advantage of the porting process is l ikely much

higher than 6%.

Direct comparison of different countries’ porting rates can be problematic, as

the statistics are reported inconsistently, and port ing rates are affected by

many market factors, such as speed, cost, and ease of port ing, number of

mobile networks, and the competitive landscape. However, MNP in Ghana is

remarkably more successful than efforts in the three other sub-Saharan Afr ica

countries with MNP, which record annual porting rates of 0.5%, 0.07%, and

0.004%. Ghana’s annual porting rate was 1.6% in its f irst year, and 2.9% in its

third year.

Chart 1 below shows the number of completed, aborted (unsuccessful), and

blocked porting requests on a month -by-month basis from launch through the

end of June, 2014.


3

Chart 1 – Month by Month Por t ing Requests

Chart 2 below shows each request category’s cumulat ive numbers from launch

through the end of June, 2014.


4

Chart 2 – Cumulat ive Port ing Requests

The rate of porting is entirely consistent with expectations for a market such

as in Ghana and a porting system that is consumer -friendly and operating

efficiently. The performance to date far surpasses reported results in other

MNP implementations in Africa.

All mobile networks are active part icipants in the MNP process , with

customers porting in and out of every network. Table 1 below shows the new

porting f low for each network through June 30, 201 4, along with the impact

on each operator’s subscriber base .

Airtel Expresso Glo MTN Tigo Vodafone

Net Gain/(Loss) (58,687) (858) (16,119) (402,244) 249,725 228,183

% of Base -1.7% -0.6% -1.2% -3.0% 6.2% 3.4%

Table 1 – Total Completed Por ts by Network by End Year 3

It is important to avoid drawing conclusions that cannot be supported by this

data. There are many different factors that can lead customers to port their

numbers. Also note that the cumulative port ing for any given network is not


5

sufficiently large to have been the sole cause of changes in market rank for

that network.

At the end of the third year, 72% of all numbers which had been ported

remained ported; in other words, they had not ported back to their original

network and had not become inactive. Over the three years of porting so far,

this represents an approximate 1% rate of porting back to the original ne twork

or becoming inactive each month . This compares favorably to the overal l

market average churn rate, which indicates that 4.5% of customers leave a

network each month. Users of MNP therefore appear to be more loyal than

average.

As of the end of the third year, all mobile networks in Ghana ha ve continued

their policies of absorbing the porting fee on behalf of the customer porting

to them. The volume of completed porting requests in the third year has

reduced the per-port cost by 81%. That factor and the higher loyalty described

above validates the networks’ decision to cover the porting fee.

Performance

In Ghana’s porting process, a customer wishing to port will vis it the agent of

the network he wishes to join (the “recipient” netw ork), who submits the

porting request to the central system. When matched with the free validating

SMS sent by the customer, the request is passed to his current network (the

“donor” network), who must approve or block the request. Upon receipt of an

approval, the recipient network will send an instruction to commence the

actual porting, and the donor network will send confirmation that the

customer’s account has been closed. All networks in Ghana are then notif ied

of that number’s new location at the recip ient.

Processing time for a porting request after it has reached the central system

and has been matched with the validating SMS thus depends on two responses

from the donor and one from the recipient. The response time quality of

service standards have ensured that porting is extremely fast in Ghana,

beating any international benchmark.

As measured from the moment a porting request is eligible for processing until

it is completed, in June, 2014 the average porting time was 4 minutes, 15

seconds. 91% of porting requests were completed in f ive minutes or less , and


6

67%, or two-thirds of the requests were completed in 2 minutes or less. Chart

3 shows the rate at which porting requests were completed during that month.

Chart 3 –Port ing Request Complet ion T im es, June, 2014

Average porting speed can be negatively affected by occasional disruptions in

an operator’s internal systems , failure of those systems to act upon a

particular request , or by maintenance or malfunction of the central porting

system or in operators’ connections with it. The automated late response alert

implemented in 2013 notif ies the relevant personnel by SMS and email each

time a response has not been received as expected, which mitigates the

impact of such incidents. In the third year of porting, this system sent 11,313

late response alerts.

Porting success rate is affected by aborted and blocked ports and is another

important measure of performance. A porting request which is not matched

with a validation SMS will be aborted by the system after 2 days. A request

wil l be also aborted if the recipient does not act within 2 days after the donor

has approved a request. A blocked request is one which the d onor network

has cited one of the several permitted reasons to deny approving the request,

such as the account having been on their network for less than thirty days, or

the phone/SIM having been reported stolen.


7

Chart 4 below shows on a monthly basis the relative percentage of requests

which are completed, aborted, and blocked.

The overall success rate of requests submitted in the third year of porting was

81.0%, marginal ly down from 81.7% in the second year. The monthly success

rate varied from a low of 75.2% to a high of 84.7%.

The blocked port rate has remained fairly constant at 5.4% for the year

monthly low of 4.5% and high of 6.4%. Blocking is the term denoting requests

to which the donor network does not agree, and for each such request they

must indicate which of the few permitted reasons applies. There is no

indication that blocking is deliberately used by donor network s to prevent

porting.

By far the most common reason for blocking is “account less than 30 days

old”, meaning that the customer’s account was f irst opened at that network

less than 30 days previously. Normally, the central porting system will not

accept porting requests for numbers which had been ported in the previous

30 days. However, while emergency r estore requests were being processed to

reverse wrongful ports, that protection was temporari ly disabled and a few

requests would slip through to be blocked by the donor network. That

loophole has now been closed and there should be no further blocks for t hat

particular reason.

Some blocks are caused by the bil l ing system misinterpret ing the date a

change was made to a customer account (such as prepaid to postpaid,

reactivation upon credit recharge, SIM replacement) to mean the date the

account was opened. Additional monitoring and discussion with the operators

should allow these deficiencies in their software to be corrected.

The remaining blocks are l ikely in respect of customers who have just opened

accounts with new numbers but want to port those new n umbers almost

immediately. This seems i l logical, because the customer is not yet very

attached to this new number and few contacts are even aware of the number.

After blocks due to the other causes described above have reduced , we can

decide whether the remaining blocks for this unexplained customer behavior

warrant any further investigation.

The abort rate in the third year was 13.6%, and varied between 9.9% and

20.3% on a monthly basis. Almost all aborts were caused by the lack of a

matching validat ion SMS. Some were due to agents submitting porting

requests without any actual customer, and the operators are working to


8

determine why they would do so. Other aborts, in which no SMS was sent b y

the customer, demonstrate that the validation system is working .

Chart 4 – Aborted, Com pleted , B locked Requests Norm al ized to 100%

There will always be a certain percentage of blocked and aborted requests

each month which demonstrates that the porting systems are performing

properly to val idate requests and protect customers . The only way to

determine what success rate should be considered normal is to continue with

the ongoing task of analyzing and understanding customer, agent, and bil l ing

system behavior and to control or eliminat e any issues identif ied which are

not in the customer’s interest. We therefore expect modest reductions in the

blocking and abort rates going forward, which wil l produce a s l ightly improved

success rate.

Challenges and the Way Forward

The rate of porting in Ghana remains consistent and stable. The goal of

empowering any customer who wished to change networks but was hesitant

to do so because his number would have changed has been achieved, but as


9

with any system, monitoring and maintena nce are required and incremental

improvement is possible.

Ghana passed the 1 mill ion successful port milestone on October 12, 2013. As

shown in Chart 5 below, a s imple roll ing average method of prediction tells us

that we will approach and may reach 2 mill ion by the end of 2014.

Chart 5 – Completed Requests s ince Launch and Pred ict ion through 201 4

The fundamental principles of porting are very simple. A customer who ports

is not treated very differently than one who is only quitting one network and

joining another. They both have to appear in person with their ID in order to

register with their new network, whether it is for a new number or one being

ported from another network . Registration information is held by each

network, not at a central point.

When the customer wants to bring his number to the new network, he must

also sign a porting request form which explains that he will be leaving behind

any credit or features at his former network, and he must send the va lidation

SMS described earl ier.

The behavior of porting agents in the f ield acting on behalf of the mobile

operators is sti l l a concern, but on the balance, the use of agents is posit ive.


10

Otherwise, porting could not be ubiquitous and customers wishing to port

would suffer the expense and inconvenience of traveling to and queuing in

the operators’ off icial shops.

We have under development various software changes that will al low NCA and

operators to identify more quickly and effectively those agents who are

responsible for a disproportion ate share of inappropriate porting requests,

and we expect this to be operational within 2014.

Certain agents will , at t imes, tell potential customers that they are being given

a free SIM for a new network and wil l then submit a porting request on their

behalf, sending the validation SMS from the customer’s phone under the guise

of “registering the new SIM”. Customers later discover that their account has

been closed at their old network because the number was ported.

There is an emergency restore procedu re in place that, with the cooperation

of both networks involved, the customer, and Porting Access Ghana, will

quickly restore the customer’s number to the original network. This can

usually be done within one or two business days, depending on the availab il ity

of the customer to explain the circumstances that led to the port. We have

begun to implement technical and procedural improvements that should allow

a majority of emergency restore procedures to take place on the same day as

the complaint is registered.

Meanwhile, it would be wrong to characterize the phenomenon as an

epidemic. In the third porting year, the rate of emergency restores was 5.4

out of every one thousand successful ports.

Consumer Issues

If a mobile customer is dissatisf ied about any aspect of the service experience

at their present network in Ghana, they can move to another network easi ly

without losing their mobile number. Al l they need to do is visit an agent or

shop of the network they wish to join and take with them proper identif ication

and their phone. The process is free, fast, and reliable.

All customers should read the porting request form careful ly and be sure to

understand it before signing it or handing their phone to an agent . It is

important to recognize that in porting, a customer is agreeing to leave his

current network, and that SIM will stop working when the porting process is

completed. No agent who claims that a number can be active on two networks

at the same time should be trusted; it is impossible.


11

The recipient network – that which the customer is seeking to join - is

responsible to keep the customer informed regarding the progress of the

porting process and to resolve any diff iculties which occur. We have foun d

that in the small percentage of porting requests which experience diff iculties,

it is general ly due to deficiencies or lapses at the network to which the

customer is porting, not at the network they are leaving.

Remember that anyone who is not sat isf ied at their new network can port

their number again after only 30 days , either to their previous network or to

a new one.

NCA is available to resolve any diff iculty with porting and can be reached

through these means:

Web site: http://www.nca.org.gh/40/125 /Make-a-Complaint.html

Email: [email protected]

Phone: 030 701 1419

Facebook: MNP Ghana (group page)

Again, the Authority expresses its appreciation to the staff and management

of the mobile networks and the central system operator Porting Access Ghana

Limited as well as to the customers who have made Ghana the unquestioned

MNP leader in Africa and placed us among the top MNP operations in the

world. NCA looks forward to further refinement and improvement in the

system.

mobile number portability in ghana third year report number portability in ghana - third year report...

Documents