Wireless telephone companies have sold Canadians on the idea of mobility for years. But they never meant the kind of mobility Ottawa now plans to mandate: The ability to take their personal cellphone number with them to a rival carrier.
The government surprised most of the telecom industry by revealing in this week's federal budget that it will ask the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission “to move expeditiously to implement wireless number portability.”
The regulator hadn't intended to address the controversial issue until later this year. Now, depending on how the government proceeds, it could bring change in the next few months.
“I think this is going to be very popular with wireless consumers,” said Ian Angus, of industry consultant Angus TeleManagement.
“The fact is, it's the kind of thing customers love and suppliers hate, because not having number portability means they can lock the customer in. It's a barrier to competition.”
In the United States, government regulators forced the wireless industry to offer portable numbers more than a year ago. Despite industry predictions that the move would create chaos for companies as consumers hop-scotched from one carrier's promotion to another, the rate of turnover has been relatively low.
“When we looked around at ways to modernize the telecom framework in this country, it's one of the issues that stood out as something that we could act on, given that other major jurisdictions had done so. The systems seem to have worked there,” said Ian Jack, senior communications adviser to the Minister of Industry, David Emerson.
Canada's wireless industry said it won't resist number portability, but questioned whether the feature was really in consumers' interests and whether the government really intended to force implementation.
“I think the intention here is that it will be dealt with by the CRTC, even though it reads a bit differently,” said Lawson Hunter, executive vice-president of regulatory affairs for Montreal-based BCE Inc., which owns Bell Mobility.
He warned that portability would mean added costs for consumers and many would find that their handsets won't work on rival carriers' networks.
“Other issues have been much more important to the customer,” said Peter Barnes, president and chief executive officer of the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association, which represents mobile carriers.
There's a possibility that only a small percentage of customers would actually want portability, but everybody would have to share the cost. The right balance will have to be found, he said.
The costs pertain to handset subsidies, but also to carriers maintaining databases on former customers and rerouting every one of their calls to their new carrier. U.S. carriers have been charging each customer between 10 cents and 50 cents each month since portability was mandated, Mr. Barnes said.
Telus Corp. says the U.S. experience has shown portability to be expensive and to take time to implement. “There will be costs and consumers will likely see them passed on to them,” said Mark Langton, a spokesman for the firm's mobility division.
There has not been any groundswell of consumer interest in portability, but Telus will not resist the government's efforts to institute it, he said. However, the Vancouver-based company said it wants to have input into the consultation process.
Consumer advocates, however, insist consumers only stand to benefit from portability. The Public Interest Advocacy Centre, non-profit organization that provides legal and research services, says competition would be “significantly enhanced” if customers could keep their telephone numbers when they changed carriers.
