Read Before You Decide to Port Your Mobile Number – My experience

Mobile Number Portability was long awaited and finally introduced to the Nigerian consumers in April 2003. It was a welcome move and many were excited at it. We were finally going to get our pound of flesh from the telecom companies that have served us poorly and held us to ransom. Everyone and anyone were free to migrate to any network of their choice without any hindrance.

Three months later and only about 10,000 people had ported as reported on Guardian Online. I was one of such people.

90 days later, I have ported one of my lines back to the original network I ported away from.

When I ported, everything worked as I expected and I was happy. Although I initially found it very difficult to port, a few days later, the port was successful and everything seems to be working well, except they were not.

The first problem I encountered was that I was unable to receive bank alerts on my line. I assumed this was due to the fact that I had just changed my Telco service provider. I went to the bank to drop the number with them again, but I still couldn’t receive alerts.

At this point, I had ported two of my GSM lines. Unlike many other people, I ported because I wanted to experience porting and do a story on it. The story ended up not being a pleasant one. I decided to give the bank my second number—that was also ported. I received alert on the other number for three days and then it stopped.

I observed that due to the fact that I had ported the two numbers, they stopped receiving bank alerts. I complained to my bank, they couldn’t sort it out. I went to my mobile Telco service provider and they did not know what the problem was with my GSM line. The complaint is still lying on their desk.

Other Issues I experienced

Receiving bank alerts happen not to be the only issue that occur due to the fact that I ported. Each time I use my ported GSM line for registration for a service online and need to authenticate my number (while expecting the online service to send me a code for authentication), It fails me. It fails me all of the time.

I couldn’t even activate WhatsApp on my iPhone via SMS authentication. I had to opt for the option of authenticating via voice. The voice authentication worked. It was the same problem with iMessage—I couldn’t activate my number for iMessage. [iMessage needs to also send a short message to my service provider in order to activate iMessage on my phone]. I took the complaint in this case to the service provider again, but I left with no solution.

By this time, it was already 90 days. According to the rule guiding Mobile Number Portability, one is free to move from one network to the other, but one will have to wait for 90 days after each porting before one can initiate another porting request.

I was bent on getting to the root of this matter. So I picked a fresh SIM from one of the service providers I ported to and registered the SIM. I inserted it to my iPhone and tried to activate all the services I couldn’t activate—iMessage, WhatsApp and Bank Alerts. Boom! They all worked. Before I concluded that this is a problem that isn’t peculiar to me, I asked on Twitter if there are other people experiencing this same problem and I got responses from people who have ported that are also experiencing the same problem and want a solution.

The Solution I found

Since it has been 90 days plus since I ported, I initiated a porting request to be ported back to the network I was on originally. It took me about four days before they could do that. I found three other people at the store who also come to port their number back. Their own reason was that they were not satisfied with the network they ported to. On the fourth day, I got an SMS telling me that my porting is being processed. A few mins later, I got a conformation by SMS telling me to inset the SIM I was given and my line started to work.

Everything is working well now. My SMS is working. WhatsApp and iMessage authentication is working too.

Number Portability in Nigeria is still in teething phase. If you want 100 percent functionality of your mobile number, DO NOT PORT just yet. Wait let them fix this issue.

Why would you want to port in the first place? As it is indicated by the experience I have shared above, you’ll see that there are people who have ported and then came back, because porting never gave them a better experience.

The Porting that works

Get another SIM and possibly get a dual SIM phone and save yourself the stress that can result from trying to port and then finding out that many of the services you need aren’t fully working.

About the author
Jesse is a voracious reader of technology junk news. He connects the dots between these news articles and make sense out of them. He shares his opinions via his twitter page regularly.