Mobile Network Portability is a service that allows mobile service consumers to switch between providers while maintaining their phone number. It's implementation in a region is expected to deepen the level of competition of Mobile telephone operators for customers and this competition may be switched to quality of services and innovativeness. (CCK). Mobile Network Portability solves the problem of customers who hold more than one phone, each for a network and losing contacts when one switches from network to network.
Kenya on the 1st April 2011 became the 63rd country (joining the likes of Egypt, Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa, in Africa) in the world to implement this service, where it became part of the legislation for performing a GSM license for the four GSM operators.
Although it is aimed at simplifying the lives of the customers and upping the service quality offered by the GSM operators through competition, it's uptake in many countries has been lacking. The Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK) says that it carried out public sensitizations and consultations between 2004 and 2008, which showed too much readiness from the customers.
TNS RMS, the largest leading market research agency in Africa has looked at the question of uptake. It conducted a short qualitative study to investigate what ordinary Kenyans think about the move, and reviewed some experience from other markets but neither suggested that portability will have a major positive impact on consumers.
Our qualitative investigation amongst Kenyan consumers indicated that while press speculation and advertising by the likes of Airtel has meant that awareness of the plans are quite high, consumer comprehension remains generally low, and the benefits are not considered clear or compelling. Some thought that portability simply meant swapping provider others thought you could use the same number for multiple providers. Around charges, consumers were not clear on whether they would be charged to swap back to their original provider...Says the report
The CCK says the idea behind introducing number portability was to introduce checks into industry. The Director of CCK also states that instead of looking at the number of people going to port, the commission was looking at the checks the policy was going to introduce in the Telecommunication Market. This comes to contradict the facts of 2004-2008 consultations, and also conflicts with the principles of ICT strategic Policy formulation. Joan Lloyd states that 'stakeholder buy-in' is key to successful Implementation of new ideas. She further points out that with out stakeholder buy-in, we get a wall between the new ideas and the old ideas. With these facts, one can take MNP as a failure in Kenya, because it has failed to win the hearts of some stakeholders and some are not even finding their expectations in the policy.
Using Kenya as a Benchmarking comparator in MNP to Uganda, would you support Uganda to go ahead and implement this policy? Do you take Kenya's case as a failure?
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