When will the chaos of number portability end?

The full implementation of the number portability policy has provided the "fed up" people with an opportunity to vote with their feet, and has also put forward requirements for the three major operators to continuously improve their service levels. Complying with the original intention of the regulatory authorities to formulate policies is the basis for operators to operate in accordance with regulations, disciplines and laws, and is also an inevitable requirement for operators to safeguard the interests of the people. However, information about operators violating regulations in handling number portability continues to emerge.

1. Set up the import and export assessment

The purpose of implementing number portability is to force operators to improve their services by voting with their feet, and then operators can win the favor of users by providing high-quality services. However, the actual operation is not like this. Operators issue assessment indicators for porting in and out, forcing employees to find ways to first maintain a balance between porting in and out, and then increase the number of porting in.

Some grassroots staff of operators reported that county-level companies directly assigned the majority of mobile phone users to employees for care. If a user under care ported out to a competitor, the employee in charge of the user would need to port in a user from the competitor to maintain the bottom line balance of number portability. Therefore, spending money to buy a number card from another network to port to the local network, or spending money to buy a stock number from another network to port to the local network has become an open secret at the grassroots level.

In the eyes of some grassroots employees, number portability has lost its meaning under the improper internal assessment of operators. This is because the illegal operations forced by operators to implement through assessment have deviated from the original meaning of competition and distorted the value of the number portability policy itself.

2. Induce users to switch networks

In addition to assigning the responsibility of looking after users to grassroots employees and forcing them to spend money to purchase number portability quotas, municipal and provincial companies also formulate various incentive policies to attract users from other networks to port their numbers. They promote and implement these policies through various agency channels, and urge units with lagging indicators to increase their quotas through various internal notifications and business analyses.

Recently, a communication person revealed that a local operator offered rice cookers, water purifiers, and air purifiers worth hundreds of yuan as bait to attract users to apply for number portability. In addition to giving benefits to users who switch networks, operators also need to pay a large amount of remuneration to the channels that handle number portability. According to the revelations of netizens on the forum, agents can get a remuneration of about 200 yuan per household for successfully porting users from other networks.

Data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology have shown that after breaking through the population ceiling, the number of new mobile phone users with ID cards has been decreasing. Some operators, with the traditional mindset of relying on new markets to drive revenue growth, have used number portability as a starting point to poach each other’s employees and engage in low-level competition.

3. Keen on disorderly propaganda

Under the influence of live streaming, operators are trying to influence users’ choice behavior by fully amplifying the herd effect through various publicity. Whether it is Moments, WeChat public accounts, or even Douyin or Kuaishou short videos, they have become the propaganda positions of operators for number portability. There are both organizational behaviors at the company level and individual behaviors of operators’ employees.

The feelings of individual users are unlikely to have a universal influence. However, after various intentional publicity by operators, the feelings of individual users will be infinitely magnified and they will consciously or unconsciously accept the influence of publicity. For number portability, publicity itself has not substantially improved the service level of operators, but it has truly affected user choices.

The regulatory authorities have clearly required that the data on number portability should not be made public, and that various marketing propaganda on number portability should not be carried out. From what we have learned, although the latest data on number portability cannot be found through public channels, various niche marketing propaganda on number portability has not been eliminated.

4. Free gift to set up obstacles for network switching

In addition to the primary concern of maintaining the base, the three major operators are making every effort to snatch users from other operators. Even if they make great efforts to maintain the base, the grassroots have already resorted to all kinds of tricks. Various text messages and phone calls to retain users, various data and voice gifts, and various home broadband and phone bill bundling have been used. Of course, as a strategy to retain existing users, these operations are understandable.

In order to compete for users of other operators to transfer to their own network, a netizen of the Communication People's Home Forum revealed that some grassroots employees of the three operators even went to the business offices of other operators to open cards before carrying out the number portability operation, and some even provided vehicles to pick up users who intended to transfer to their own network to handle related services. This situation in the early stage of the full implementation of the number portability policy can still be seen on the Internet. This alienated number portability gameplay has, to some extent, consumed the original intention of number portability to spur operators to improve network and service quality.

In fact, the majority of grassroots employees are unwilling to use various crooked methods of number portability, but they have no choice due to various assessment pressures or business notifications. After all, they have the responsibility to supervise. And once it is discovered that competitors have crooked ideas, everyone will inevitably follow suit, and even go beyond them. In fact, in order to prevent number portability from deviating from the predetermined track, it is necessary for the regulatory authorities to further regulate number portability. Otherwise, the competitive pressure transmitted from above will inevitably make the grassroots at a loss except to use crooked methods.

Although the time for the full implementation of the number portability policy is limited, according to data from provinces and cities that have piloted it, the proportion of users willing to port their numbers is less than 2%, which is not a large scale. Whether number portability can play the original intention of the policy and become a driving force for the people to improve their sense of happiness still needs further clarification of regulatory measures by the regulatory authorities.