Safaricom in the Spotlight Over Backlog of Switching Requests

Jevans Nyabiage

28 April 2011

Nairobi — Porting Access Kenya Ltd on Thursday pointed a finger at Safaricom, accusing it of frustrating subscribers seeking to switch networks under the mobile number portability service.

“The problem lies with Safaricom,” Porting Access Kenya Ltd chairman Patrick Musimba said while giving a progress report on the service. “They are not allowing ports to go through.”

He said this went against the International Telecommunications Union guidelines on provision of telecommunications service and flouted licensing conditions as well.

Porting Access, the firm that manages the switching, released data showing that since April 1, when the service was launched, it had received 43,545 port requests by Wednesday.

However, according to Mr Musimba, many requests remained blocked while short messages to 1501 were not going through while others timed out.

“The bulk of SMSs for port requests are pending – 34 per cent – while about 26 per cent are timed out,” he said, with its report showing that about 43,000 subscribers had sent requests to port to Airtel, said Mr Musimba, majority of them from Safaricom.

Of this, only 10,000 have been successful, 15,000 are pending while 11,000 timed out.

According to the data, 450 out of 900 mobile phone users who have requested to join Safaricom, have had successful port-ins with the rest either timed out or awaiting SMS approval.

Telkom Kenya’s Orange has attracted 40 requests with 25 live while Essar Telecom’s Yu has so far had more than 200 requests with about 80 being successful.

Safaricom, however, disputed claims that it was blocking subscribers from porting, arguing that even users who have requested to port to its network were experiencing delays.

The firm’s director of regulatory and corporate affairs, Mr Nzioka Waita, accused Porting Access and Airtel of “peddling lies”.

He charged that Airtel was enticing subscribers to port without first disclosing to them the full information on what they are likely to gain or lose.

“They are not disclosing to clients who wish to port that they will lose M-Pesa when they port,” said Mr Waita on Wednesday during a Safaricom media workshop.

Airtel Kenya managing director Mr Rene Meza said consumer enthusiasm had been dampened by operators execution issues.

He added that only slightly over 10,000 of the porting request were successfully completed – a paltry success rate of 22.2 per cent – defeating the desired delivery of freedom of choice to Kenyan mobile users.

Mr Meza said consumers wishing to port from Safaricom and sending an SMS to the short-code with the word ‘Hama’ are being frustrated because their texts do not reach Porting Access database and are therefore not processed.

“Once a customer successfully ports out of Safaricom in most cases the customer is cut off from communication with other consumers on the Safaricom network,” he added.

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