By Faizal Badat, Senior Product Manager, Vox

Even though number porting – if you want to move between telecoms service providers while retaining your existing phone number – has been around over the last ten years, this is unfortunately restricted to geographic and cellular numbers, putting business users at a disadvantage.

We have seen a growing demand from businesses – currently making use of numbers within the 080 and 086 range – for a more efficient and affordable telecommunications solution. Primary users of these numbers include companies from banking, insurance and healthcare industries, who often invest significantly in marketing and advertising using their customer service phone number.

Due to limitations in regulation however, they have to make do with either changing their number (and all their marketing, branding and advertising material along with it), or having to incur a call forwarding charge for each and every call – both of which add up to unnecessary expenditure a business could do without.

Unfortunately while there have been some comments that these businesses will soon be able to port to other service providers, the reality is that there has yet to be any announcement from the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa). While the the latest number porting regulation allows for the porting of non-geographic numbers in the 080, 086 and 087 national destinations, this has yet to be put into force.

National numbering plan regulation

According to Icasa, telephone numbers carry useful information including geographic significance for fixed lines, the type of service being accessed, and in some cases the rates applicable to those services.

Numbers between 010 and 058 – with a few ‘protected’ exceptions – have been released as geographic area codes for cities and towns around South Africa, while the rest are identified as non-geographic. Numbers between 060 and 079, and 081 and 084 are in use by mobile operators. Numbers starting with 080 are primarily used for toll-free services, and 086 is used for inbound services.

Likewise, 087 is used for voice over internet protocol (VoIP) services, 089 for mass calling services, and numbers starting between 090 and 092 are used for premium rate services. Numbers starting with 096 until 098 have been released for machine related services.

Still a place for voice

Despite the rise in the use of instant messengers and other video apps for personal communications, there remains a demand for more cost-effective voice solution, primarily for business users needing to reach out to existing and prospective customers.

In addition, these methods are often limited by letting you only reach out to people who are already in your address book, are already your ‘friends’ on a particular social platform, or need to have the same application installed on their phone

Instead of using consumer targeted instant messengers, the solution for businesses is to turn to a mobile application-based softphone service, such as Vox’s Vobi, which makes use of voice over internet protocol (VoIP) to make more affordable calls  across South African networks. Integration with selected cloud-hosted PBX systems brings further mobility to organisations, as smartphones can be turned into extensions.

As part of the switch to VoIP, most individual and business users have had the option of either porting their existing geographic or cellular code based number, or getting a new number from within the non-geographic 087 range. Current legislation however means that a host of companies stand to miss out, as they currently use numbers that cannot be ported.

Despite there being a court challenge against the new number portability regulation from one of the mobile operators, we believe Icasa can still implement part of the new regulations dealing specifically with non-geographic number porting, without needing to halt the entire process.

Bringing true number portability will level the playing field for a wide variety of businesses that rely on inbound contact centres, by giving them access to a competitive telecoms market that offers them more cost-effective voice communications solutions along with improved levels of service that ultimately benefits the end customer – ordinary people.