Early last year, Kenya’s communications regulator, the Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK), introduced mobile number portability (MNP) to offer mobile users a means of switching from one service operator to another — without the need to change the subscribed cellphone numbers.
CCK says this was to support the mobile industry’s competition. From the beginning however, MNP continuously showed mixed signals. The industry regulator recently released quarterly results — between January and March 2012 — shows only 6,646 in-ports exist, a low figure considering that the total number of mobile users in Kenya is now pegged at around 29.2 million.
This means, if each in-port has individual users, then the MNP has supplicated to only 0.02 percent of the overall mobile users, experts say.
Last year’s statistics showed initial figures of 36,224 in-ports were recorded three months after the inception of the MNP technology. When the MNP hit Kenya in April last year however, the reactions of the subscribers and problems of penetration into market caused “the urge for success to dangle.”
The MNP’s appeal to subscribers dropped to 1929 in-ports between July and September last year.
By the end of the year, this service hadn’t picked up yet it prompted the need for a reality check as the in-ports between October and December were only 2,407.
The cost of porting a number is tagged at KSh200, according to Safaricom, the country’s principal network operator.
Had the Kenyan market accepted the technology, Porting Access Ltd, the company that provides the MNP service, would not have “scored badly.”
Consumer’s uptake of the service was slow-paced, comments an analyst, they would rather have duo-SIM card handsets, multiple SIM cards or even two handsets instead of moving from one service to another.
