Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Carriers only 50% ready for WLNP, report finds

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2003 14:05:09 -0500

Carriers only 50% ready for WLNP, report finds
By DAN MEYER
November 03 13:33:00, 2003

A report from wireless industry analyst firm Mobile Competency is
calling into question claims by wireless carriers that
they will be ready for wireless local number portability Nov. 24 and is
suggesting enterprises hold off on number porting
plans until at least spring 2004.

The report, “Wireless Number Portability: This Ain’t Y2K,” ranks the
nation’s six largest wireless carriers in WLNP
preparedness, finding that while Nextel Communications Inc., Sprint PCS
and Verizon Wireless are currently the best
prepared for porting enterprise customers with little or no service
disruption, they are still only about 50-percent ready
for the mandate.

Bob Egan, Mobile Competency founder and president, noted the report
takes into account interviews with the six
nationwide carriers to assess their abilities to provide enterprise
customers with quick, glitch-free ports and a smooth
transition of key services, including wireless data, and found that one
month before the WLNP deadline, no major carrier
had completed testing with all five of its largest rivals.

Egan noted that while carriers are finally getting serious about WLNP,
the industry is quickly running out of time to
ensure hassle-free porting.

“We don’t see any evidence that individual carriers, let alone the
industry as a whole, have done the extensive testing
necessary to ferret out the major problems before Nov. 24,” Egan
explained. “It’s too little, too late, so enterprise
customers should wait.”

A handful of carriers have announced so-called service level agreements
with some of their competitors in an attempt to
smooth the porting process, with T-Mobile USA Inc. the only carrier to
have announced SLAs with all of its nationwide
competitors.

Egan warns that it takes two well-prepared carriers to make a successful
port, and so far, only a handful of carriers are
ready. In addition, Egan predicts that when porting troubles arise, he
expects the blame to be rightly spread among
most of the parties involved in WLNP.

“If port fails en masse, don’t be surprised when the wireless industry
blames the [Federal Communications Commission]
for both moving the deadline to the worst possible time of the year and
failing to craft rules that address every possible
scenario,” Egan explained. “There’s plenty of blame to go around, but at
the end of the day, that’s cold comfort for
enterprise subscribers whose mobile phones stop working.”

While enterprise customers are being warned to avoid switching carriers
until the bugs are worked out of the system, a
consumer survey by MyRatePlan.com has found that Verizon Wireless will
be the big winner of WLNP with 26 percent of respondents claiming they
plan to move to the nation’s largest carrier once the mandate is
implemented later this
month.

T-Mobile USA Inc. is a distant second with 11 percent of respondents
claiming a move to the smallest of the country’s
nationwide operators, followed by AT&T Wireless Services Inc. at 9.1
percent, Nextel at 7.1 percent, and Cingular
Wireless L.L.C. and Sprint PCS tied for fifth with 6.2 percent each. On
the positive side, the survey found that 31.3
percent of respondents said they are undecided as to which carriers will
be their new service providers.
The survey also found that coverage was the most important reason for
switching for customers, followed by 30 percent
who claimed price.
http://rcrnews.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?newsId=15762

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