iconectiv, a leader in trusted, neutral, third party national scope clearinghouse solutions, announced that Nigeria, Africa’s largest country with approximately 120-million mobile subscriptions, has officially launched number portability, making iconectiv the supplier for the top three markets in Africa currently offering number portability.
After Nigeria in number of subscriptions, Egypt, with approximately 90-million mobile subscriptions and South Africa, with approximately 70-million subscriptions also rely on iconectiv’s number portability solution. With the combination of Nigeria, Egypt and South Africa, iconectiv now serves approximately 75% of all mobile subscriptions in Africa where number portability is currently available.
Worldwide, iconectiv’s solutions support over 1-billion end-users.
Removing the barrier of losing one’s telephone number when switching operators is a catalyst in creating a more competitive telecommunications environment that ultimately leads to innovation, better quality and service.
Following best practices for implementing number portability, Nigeria uses a recipient operator method, meaning subscribers contact the new operator they want to switch to in order to initiate the porting request.
By instituting business rules that make it easy for subscribers to port their numbers, the Nigerian Communications Commission has positioned their market for success and growth.
“Number portability is a valuable service for our people that will also lead to more competitive and higher quality offerings,” says Dr. Eugene Juwah, executive vice chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission.
“The smooth and problem free number portability launch in Nigeria speaks volume of a painstaking and transparent choice of a consortium which includes Telcordia featuring iconectiv’s experience, reliability and product robustness.”
“We want to congratulate the Nigerian Communications Commission and all of the Nigerian operators for bringing number portability to Nigeria,” says Chris Drake, chief technology officer and executive VP of iconectiv.
“We look forward to a long and successful partnership and plan to support the Nigerian market not only with our number portability solutions but also with additional communication related products.”
The ability to seamlessly complete inter-operator number portability services while also safe guarding subscriber telephone number information, requires that the number portability solution be robust, flexible and extremely scalable. With more global number portability deployments than any other company, iconectiv continues to increase its market leadership position.
