The joint venture company formed by the country’s three telecommunication firms for the sole purpose of overseeing the smooth implementation of Mobile Number Portability law said it is trying hard to address the “roadblocks” hampering the adoption of the technology.
In a statement on Friday, Nov. 12, Telecommunications Connectivity Inc. (TCI) assured the country’s telecom industry regulator, the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC), that it is actively working on addressing the MNP “roadblocks”.
PLDT and Smart Communications president and CEO Al Panlilio last week urged the NTC to look into “roadblocks” that are impeding the implementation of mobile number portability.
TCI said it has earlier anticipated some hiccups due to differences in the underlying network architecture and design of the network infrastructure used by mobile service providers.
“A combination of non-technical and technical issues contributed to the birth pains in the implementation of MNP,” the joint venture firm said.
Among the technical issues that TCI said it has grappled with and resolved within the first two weeks of the MNP launch on September 30 include port out rejections, unique subscriber code (USC) generation, enabling portability of Virtual Number Operators (VNOs) and airtime loading.
“New issues that have cropped up after the launch are nearing resolution as well. To the credit of the MSPs, the respective project teams from DITO, Globe, and Smart have collaborated to resolve the issues in the MNP process,” it said.
TCI said a service level agreement (SLA) is also being crafted to streamline the response time governing each critical leg of the MNP process, which is expected to improve customer experience and potentially address MNP hesitancy.
“As for market acceptance, we believe in the paramount objective of giving mobile customers the freedom to choose their providers,” it said. “The MNP supports this objective, so we are leaving it to the customers to determine if they want to change providers or not.”
