You’ll have read about the brilliant work of Charles (our CTO) and his team around porting, and separately about our BYoC capability on both Carrier Services and Hosted. Have you ever considered how together these could bring you massive strategic advantage in the marketplace and take porting off the table as a barrier to sale or migration? Some of our customers have and today I wanted to explore it.
Porting is a nightmare. It is a broken process, that for us has always been a loss leader given an onshore highly skilled team. Others have forgone both of those attributes, saving money and arguably frustrating the process even more. Some have highly skilled onshore teams dedicated to port-prevention. The net result is it is slow, expensive, and gets in the way of you winning business and bringing estates across. Even when it works, which if using us should be more often than elsewhere, you have limited control over precisely when assets are going to migrate or indeed whether they’ll move together. That makes life hard if you need to make physical on-site changes and avoid downtime for the end-users..
Our work on automation is changing the game here. We’re by no means done yet but seeing comments in our Community Slack such as “what black magic just happened on #xxxxxx – accepted by LCP and submitted and accepted by RH and scheduled within the hour of submitting it” and “No complaining from this camp; We’re getting dates back within 20-30 minutes 
As well as elevated experience we remain committed to reducing the cost of ports for our customers, to levels competitors cannot touch without subsidy. We’ll be announcing something there in due course but to set expectations, as a major driver of the cost of a port is customer behaviour (some of you love to phone up 30 seconds after submitting one or to argue with us why a port has been rejected by the LCP rather than just resubmitting correctly) we will likely not be reducing the port charge but instead offering a partial credit on those ports which have been touchless. Obviously, those customers of a more automated and trusting disposition will see a greater level of credits, although it’ll overall depend on our progress and the mix of automatable LCPs. We’re committed to passing on this benefit though and along the way it’ll provide valuable data on the relative cost and effort of porting across different providers, which I have little doubt our regulator will get to see. If, with identical behaviour at our end, under an industry agreed process, we can agree a port with one LCP in 5 minutes and another on average takes 3 weeks and 15 phone calls, that shines a light on who the miscreants and dinosaurs are. Heck, maybe we should publish a league table as the worst offenders are very quick to point out our flaws to anyone who will listen. Alas I digress!
So porting is heading to be the best it can be at the lowest cost it can be but we can do more to give you advantage and make your customers’ lives easier, and that involves BYoC.
BYoC is the multi-tool that can do everything from enabling you to expand globally, or add encryption where your other carrier doesn’t have the capability, or inject features like call recording and Teams enablement on other carrier’s numbers etc. etc. It is also a great tool to enable the immediate migration of a number or even a whole estate, at a time of your choosing, regardless of the porting status.
Let us take the example of a customer of ours who has a large estate with a dinosaur. Wholesale porting, i.e. [ab]using the porting process to move that estate, is wrong and incredibly laborious. The correct solution to optimising your supply chain like this is leaving numbers where they are unless and until the customer wishes to change retail provider, but that doesn’t work for everyone. Ofcom will in our experience say ‘reach a commercial agreement’, money will change hands and the estate will migrate either en-masse or quite often using the porting process in a tolerated way. We’ve done this numerous times in both directions. However, it still takes time and time is what you don’t have when you’re wanting to throw a switch on 200,000 numbers.
That is where BYoC comes in. Presuming your platform is already interop’d with Simwood, then you can repoint, or have repointed, the estate of numbers to a BYoC endpoint. That means the numbers don’t move from the legacy carrier, but you see calls coming in over Simwood. You can swing the estate to us as fast as the other side enables you to repoint them, which could be immediately if they have any level of API or portal. You can then port or migrate them in an organised and agreed manner behind the scenes. The migration makes an economic difference to you but it makes zero technical difference to you or your customer because calls are arriving on your platform from Simwood identically, whether or not the number has been ported. It could conceivably take 6 months to do this, but by doing it behind the scenes, in a technically inert way, your customer is enjoying the benefits of moving way before the port happens.
This example is for migration of entire estates but the same principles can work for winning an individual customer. The only added variable there is that the LCP needs the capability and willingness to deliver the customers calls to a SIP endpoint, which you’d set to be a BYoC address on Simwood. Then the calls would come into you exactly as they will once porting has eventually concluded, you’re in control of the routing in the meantime and can migrate the customer to your platform and any on-side equipment you need to deploy at your leisure. Contrast this with trying to align a porting request to a site visit and hoping for no downtime!
BYoC is free while in beta so why not give this a go? We’re wanting to assess use cases and where value is added most, but this is emerging as an early leader – enabling us to win estates and our customers to win customers, where previously the porting could have made it ‘too hard’.
