MNP (Mobile Number Portability) on the Isle of Man (a little Island that’s somewhere between Great Britain and Ireland) is very fast indeed – if I said to you as little as 10 minutes to swap Operators, what would you say?! That realistically opens the possibility to go in to an Operator shop, and walk out with your number ported. Talk about convenient!
Of course, MNP used to be the bain of the Mobile Industry – globally, and also in my local reference market, the UK. Not so very long ago, it took a weeks or even a month to get things swapped over, with no indication of when your porting might happen, and frequent problems. I’ve cunningly avoided this for years by sticking with same Operator (!), but that’s not really a solution. In recent years in the UK, the porting process was forced down to 48hrs by regulator intervention, but because Isle of Man doesn’t operate under these same laws, it can be done (and typically is) much faster.
There are three Operators you can choose from – Manx Telecom (subsidiary of O2), Sure (subsidiary of C&W), and Wire 9 – so it’s not like its a simple back-and-forth between two Operators – there’s real competition here.
Interestingly, the Isle of Man is often used by O2 as a testbed for it’s new technologies, on the basis that it’s a self-contained entity, and hence a network-wide change can be made easily – for example the mobile broadband rollouts have variously passed through the Manx testbed first of all. Whether MNP got the same treatment I don’t know, but I want to be able to port my Mobile number whilst doing the shopping too! Gimme gimme gimme!
[Original story via: mobilenewscwp.co.uk / Image via: Wikipedia]