Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Phase I of porting process down, Phase II to go

From: Marcelrf <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 01 Apr 2004 04:07:33 -0500

Article published Mar 28, 2004
Phase I of porting process down, Phase II to go

By Lauren Mayk

In the days leading up to one of the biggest developments in the
wireless phone industry, consumers and analysts talked anxiously about
the freedom that was about to be bestowed on millions of mobile phone
users.

Soon, they would be able to switch carriers without losing their phone
numbers, lifting a barrier that many said had held them hostage to
sub-par service and hefty monthly bills.

Freedom came on Nov. 24, but it came with a price tag and 5,852
complaints.
It was expected to rock the industry, causing a flurry of swapping by
unhappy consumers who had been waiting for a chance to dump their
wireless partner without giving up the number their friends and
colleagues knew.

But experts say the result was more like a tremor than a full-fledged
quake, a downgrade they blame partly on those iron-clad contracts with
early termination fees and partly on the doomsday predictions.

Just over a million consumers made the switch in the first month and a
half that "porting" was available -- far less than expected, said Roger
Entner, director of the wireless mobile services for the Boston-based
Yankee Group.
"It was a horrible implementation which was very well publicized,"
Entner said. "Essentially only the people who were really in serious
pain were porting."

With that event behind them, carriers are prepping for the second phase
of number portability.

Only consumers in the top 100 metropolitan statistical areas got the
switching freedom last year, but the program kicks in for the rest of
the country on May 24.

That means this time, Charlotte County residents will be able to switch
wireless carriers and keep their numbers, or cut the cord on their
landline phone and transfer that "home" number to a wireless phone.
But the spring sequel could look a little different from the fall
original.

The porting process is likely to involve more smaller regional carriers,
instead of just the big ones -- Verizon, Cingular, AT&T Wireless, Sprint
PCS, Nextel and T-Mobile. While wireless companies put together an
expensive and complicated system for porting cell numbers from one phone
to another for the November deadline, they have a different idea this
time.

Plus, the wireless industry itself has changed, with the merger of the
No. 2 and No. 3 carriers underway. That will eliminate AT&T Wireless,
the carrier that seemed to have the most trouble implementing the FCC
order the first time around.
And number portability, which all the major carriers fought vigorously
during its early introduction, has become an important piece of print,
radio and television marketing campaigns.

Still smarting from the defection of their customers to their
competitors, companies urge consumers to leave their unsatisfactory
wireless carriers behind, and remind them that they no longer have to
give up those precious nine digits.

The first round

"Wireless local number portability," as the concept is known in the
industry, was mandated by the Federal Communications Commission in an
effort to promote competition.

For customers, the process of transferring a number seemed simple
enough: Show up at the office of the carrier you want to use, bringing
along your phone, a copy of your cell phone bill and your phone number.

Wireless phone company employees check the number in a database to make
sure it is "portable" (only those top 100 population areas were eligible
the first time, and numbers had to stay in their designated geographic
areas), then send a request to the phone company that you want to leave.

But somewhere between one phone company and the other, things often went
wrong.

"We knew that we would face significant challenges with this process in
November and indeed we did," said Travis Larson of the Cellular
Telecommunications and Internet Association.

The process that was supposed to take no more than three hours -- and
ideally just minutes -- was taking much longer, or just not working at
all. Many customers had to temporarily carry two phones: their old one
to receive calls, and their new one to make them.

Dr. Ross Tucker was one of those customers, and he wasn't happy about
it.

Tucker, who lives half the year in Sarasota and half the year in
Minnesota where he works at the Mayo Clinic, was at Sarasota's Verizon
Wireless store by noon on Nov. 24. He was there to switch his service
from AT&T Wireless, which had recently dropped a stock update service he
liked, to Verizon Wireless, which he thought could offer him a better
calling plan.

He left carrying both his old and new phones, but figured the switch
would be completed within a few hours or so.
After about 10 days and what he estimated at six to eight hours of phone
calls, Tucker gave up.

He hadn't wanted to lose the number that his friends in Florida and
Minnesota already knew, but he wasn't willing to wait -- or argue -- any
longer. He took a new number from Verizon Wireless and relinquished the
old.

Tucker still had one more battle to fight. He received a bill from AT&T
for the entire month, which he thought should be reduced because it
charged him for service after he had made the switch to Verizon.

Tucker argued his side to employees at an AT&T Wireless store for about
45 minutes. When it was clear they wouldn't budge, he paid the bill for
fear of tarnishing his credit report.

"I said, 'OK, you've got me over a barrel, but I'll never do business
with you again,'" he said.

Tucker hasn't had any trouble with AT&T's billing or Verizon's service
since, but he registered his complaints with the FCC and the Consumers
Union.

"It was really disappointing to be treated in that manner," Tucker said.

Tucker's original carrier, AT&T Wireless, was named in more complaints
than any other that the FCC tracked. The FCC had received a total of
5,852 informal complaints about wireless local number portability as of
Feb. 25, with many of those letters naming more than one carrier. About
half the complaints came in during the first 30-day period after
portability kicked in.

AT&T was named in 2,787 complaints, followed by Sprint with 1,445,
Verizon Wireless with 933, T-Mobile with 854, Cingular Wireless with 849
and Nextel with 420.

With almost double the complaints of any other carrier, the response
from frustrated consumers was so overwhelming that the FCC sent a letter
to AT&T Wireless on Dec. 4, asking for an explanation.

In a response letter about a week later, the company said it had taken
steps to fix the problems that caused delays, and denied that it was
being uncooperative in completing porting requests.

Instead, it blamed technical problems and the communication between the
vendor it had chosen and the one the other five major carriers used as
their clearinghouse for the transfers. Those two companies acted as the
middlemen of the porting transactions, receiving the requests for
transfers and passing the information along.

Moving numbers between the carriers that chose Tampa-based TSI could all
be done without having to communicate with another outside company. But
AT&T Wireless used Nightfire, an affiliate of NeuStar, for its
clearinghouse, adding another party to the mix.

That caused some problems, along with the fact that some transfer
requests came with deadlines that ran out, triggering a series of
computerized messages and re-sent transfer requests that ended up
delaying the end result even longer, said the letter signed by Douglas
Brandon, AT&T Wireless vice president for external affairs and law.

AT&T's problems didn't stop with the process itself. By industry expert
accounts, the company lost more customers than any other major carrier.

For every customer AT&T Wireless picked up, it lost five to its
competitors in the early months of porting, said the Yankee Group's
Entner.

Sprint and Cingular came out about even, while Verizon was the big
winner gaining about three customers for each that defected. Nextel and
T-Mobile also came out with net gains, each signing up about two
customers for each one that walked.
Not surprisingly, with Verizon Wireless' gain, company spokesman Chuck
Hamby said the company is "very pleased overall with how things went" in
the first round.

"Obviously, we got better and better as we went along," he said. "I'm
not saying we didn't have our challenges just like everyone."

As time went on, problems were fairly individualized, their likelihood
and severity determined by a host of factors including whether customers
brought the right information with them to the stores, where they lived
and what carrier they were leaving behind, he said.

Hamby declined to name any problem competitors, although the case of
AT&T Wireless has been well-documented, but said that "all the carriers
got better."

The next round

Whether they're interested in porting or not, some mobile users are
about to get a new phone company.

AT&T Wireless, the company that took the most flak from customers and
analysts for its implementation, is about to be bought by Cingular
Wireless for about $41 billion.

The deal is expected to close in late 2004, and create the largest
wireless phone company in the nation with 46 million customers. Until
then, Cingular Wireless and AT&T Wireless are still operating as two
separate companies, said Cingular spokeswoman Dawn Benton.

So on May 24, there will still be six major carriers -- and dozens of
smaller ones, but those smaller, regional carriers are changing the game
for the second round of wireless number portability.

While Hamby, the Verizon Wireless spokesman, said the porting process
has only gotten easier during the past few months, he acknowledges that
"we may need a full measure of patience" in moving on to Phase II.

"It's going to be Verizon Wireless and Cricket Communications, Metro
PCS, these little regional players who may or may not have the resources
to prepare the way we did," he said.

They certainly don't have the deep pockets of the big boys in the
industry, and couldn't afford to shell out the estimated $1 billion it
cost the major carriers to set up the complicated system of electronic
communications that completed requests in the first round.

That system will be used for transfers from one big carrier to another,
but another one will likely take over when the porting transaction
involves a smaller regional carrier.

The small regional carriers are expected to use a fax-based system that
could involve communications by paper, by phone or by software systems
such as e-mail, said CTIA's Larson. It's a cheaper, simpler system that
some people say will likely have fewer bugs.

"I think the process in May for the smaller markets should be
significantly smoother than the process in November," Larson said.

TSI, now called Siniverse Technologies, is still working with five of
the six major carriers and has signed on more than 50 smaller or
regional companies as clients for the second phase, said Helen Harris, a
Siniverse spokeswoman.

In mid-March, dozens of small-, medium- and large-sized carriers
attended a forum in Washington, D.C., that CTIA set up to educate them
on the porting process and talk about "lessons learned" from the first
phase, Larson said.

But while carriers say the efficiency of the electronic system has
improved, details on how communications with those smaller carriers will
work are still sketchy.

Still, in looking at the November implementation, Entner says no matter
how the carriers do in May, "it can't get much worse than this."

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