Over the years, Simwood has resisted making blanket CPI+x% price rises, instead focussing on ensuring that, where appropriate, our pricing reflects the underlying cost drivers from time to time.
Number Portability is one area where we have recently introduced increasing levels of automation, and a smattering of AI, and is an area now deserving of review in light of that.
We feel that customers who embrace the automation, and in doing so, reduce our own costs should be able to enjoy the benefits of that. We committed earlier in this process to reviewing pricing to ensure the benefits were passed on and thus: fully automated ports will now attract a discount (more on that in a moment).
For our purposes, I need to make it clear that our reference to fully-automated here means no manual intervention on the part of our team. Our portal is built on our API – we don’t care which you use to submit porting orders, so don’t suddenly think you need to build a new API integration if you’re happy keying your orders today. They indistinguishably have the opportunity to benefit from our automation and thus a discount.
However, our two cost drivers in porting remain human intervention on imports and on exports, which will attract a rebalancing. For imports, we see porting requests which have not gone through a reasonable level of diligence before making their way to us, causing rejections, effort, and, with our current charging regime, insufficient disincentive for doing so. Essentially, today, those that do the right thing, are subsidising the bad orders and a headline discount risks encouraging that to shift for the worse.
Accordingly, we are going to tweak things going forward. We will now charge for the port order upon submission of the request. Upon the conclusion of that request, those that were fully automated to that conclusion will attract a discount – down to £2.50 a number (i.e. a 75% discount on the £10 per number) with a cap for those automated multiline ports of £12.50.
In other words, fully automated ports – being ~60% of the total we see each month – will be up to (depending on the cap) £7.50 a number cheaper than today. If there is manual intervention, no discount will be applied upon the conclusion of the port order.
The canny amongst you will have noted I used the term “conclusion of the port order.” That was a deliberate term, to illustrate one more minor tweak. We will no longer charge for resubmissions (which was essentially just a duplicate of the original port charge), and instead treat a resubmit as a new order. If the port is rejected, without manual intervention, the discount will apply – as the conclusion was a rejection. If it’s rejected with manual intervention, there will be no discount. Instead of a resubmit charge, the cycle starts afresh.
Or, to put it another way, the basic premise is that, if your ports aren’t fully automated end to end, you’ll pay the same as today. If they are fully automated, then you can get up to 75% as a discount upon the conclusion of your port order.
Now, the automation is partly LCP-dependent. There is a lot of scrotitude out there which requires manual handling. That’s a cost driver which will not attract the discount, as the team has to deal with the breaches of regulation that Ofcom seemingly ignore, as well as archaic practices. However, some major LCPs are honourable, hence ~60% currently achieve full automation. However, a substantial number of manual interventions today are entirely in our customer’s hands, regardless of the losing network. Calls chasing at 10am for orders placed at 8pm the day before, is one example at the forefront of the team’s mind, using Slack as a personal ticketing system, but insufficient diligence on addresses, associated numbers, etc, all add to the pile. That’s also why there’s a ~ before the percentage; it’s an average. The range across accounts is 0% to 100% on the most recent sample.
GNP imports are currently automated and these import changes will come into effect for all Carrier Services customers without a bespoke porting rate on 10th March 2025, NGNP automation is imminent and these changes will be reflected there on the same date.
That leaves exports. Our team receives badly formed NPORs, erroneous ports etc from GCPs daily, along with discharging various other obligations for your customers such as pre-order validations. With our recent changes to tariff structures on the carrier side, it is no longer feasible to provide exports for free during a minimum term, and all exports for all customers, on 10th March 2025 will be charged for at the prevailing rate.
Number Portability is the right for the End User to change their retail provider. Ofcom has clarified this publicly before, and everyone should know that, despite protestations in tickets we see. Our position on so-called “Wholesale Porting”, the use of the portability system where the End User is not changing provider, remains in light of this blog, in the same place it has evolved to over the years. It isn’t porting. It’s a separate matter for the parties. And the administrative charges and contractual clauses we have in relation to remain in play. Despite those same protestations I mention, Simwood is far from alone in that position, with many of our alleged peers implementing the same policy.
The bottom line here is that if you’re growing, and you are growing from LCPs which are adults, your total portability costs from us are going to decrease. That’s a good thing.
