On the 22nd April 2010, ICASA formally announced the implementation of fixed-line number portability in South Africa, including single number porting. “This is a fantastic move for South Africa’s telecommunications industry and really does make good inroads into our deregulation roadmap,” says Wayne Speechly, General Manager for Voice Solutions at Internet Solutions (IS). Now, both businesses and consumers are able to port their existing fixed line number range to one of the many providers in the market – allowing South Africans further freedom of choice in fixed-line telecommunications. “There is effectively no further need to have any PSTN infrastructure installed into the incumbent operator and that is where the value proposition of alternative voice providers like Internet Solutions really starts to match up,” says Speechly.

 

The biggest challenge lies the infrastructure requirement to provide the same level of service that Telkom currently does and Speechly warns that these must be addressed upfront to prevent significant challenges later. “There are many considerations that need to be assessed when making a decision, and by and large many of the VoIP providers will only disappoint in the short to medium term,” says Speechly.  Some of the complexities raised include the required capacity to facilitate the inbound calls that would ordinarily come via the PSTN. Many VoIP providers aggregate these inbound calls off a single infrastructure that also carries outbound calls. With inbound call flows now coming via other networks into the respective VoIP provider’s network, there may be inadequate capacity leaving organisation’s external stakeholders unable to reach them. 

 

Says Speechly, “Fortunately, given IS’ highly redundant and dispersed national network; and the large number of existing clients, we have inherent latent capacity that can facilitate inbound calls on a large scale.”  Another key consideration is disaster recovery.  Many VoIP providers have a single infrastructure with little or insufficient redundancy. Should interconnect links go down, an organisation’s inbound number range will be unreachable. “Having the ability to legally port numbers to your network does not mean you have the underlying infrastructure that is going to provide the required level of service. 

 

Redundancy, resiliency and backbone uptime are of paramount importance,” advises Speechly.  Finally there are handsome revenue rebates for inbound minutes – an appealing business case. “Many of the VoIP providers offer significant rebates on every inbound minute via their infrastructure. Don’t forget that this rebate is paid for by the caller phoning your number, ultimately leading to higher telecommunications charges,” he concludes.