Soheil Derakhshan, manager of the network selection team at the ACA, said it believed mobile number portability (MNP) had been a success, despite its early teething problems.
Derakhshan said the time it takes for numbers to be ported (moved across to a new provider) had improved.
According to Derakhshan, 80-90 percent of ports are currently completed within three hours. Less than three percent of the requests for porting are taking more than two days, he said. “Where at one stage they were taking longer.”
Derakhshan said the ACA would continue to monitor the length of time it takes for porting to be completed until it’s satisfied with carriers' performance. In October the ACA set an interim standard that 90 percent of ports should be completed within three hours, and no port should take more than two days to be completed.
Complaints to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO) have also dropped since the introduction of MNP.
The most recent figures from the TIO reveal that the telecommunications ombudsman received 450 complaints about mobile number portability (MNP) from the time it was introduced until the end of October.
The TIO found that 80 percent of all these complaints related to delays in porting services to alternative providers. A further 10.5 per cent of these complaints related to faults experienced after portability had taken place.
The telecommunications ombudsman also found that there was a gradual decline in the number of MNP complaints as providers and customers became familiar with porting procedures.
Vodafone spokesperson Germaine Graham said it had always realised that MNP would be a complex, and that there would be teething problems with its introduction. "It was the most complicated multi carrier IT project that telcos had ever undertaken in Australia," Graham said.
"Whilst everyone was working together to ensure it had a smooth introduction it was always going to have some teething problems, which is what we've seen," she said.
As the TIO found, there were cases of the timeframe where porting took longer than the customer hoped for. Graham said the telcos had been working hard to resolve these delay issues since then.
Nicki Ramsay, Virgin Mobile public relations manger, said it had a great response to MNP, and estimated it was taking about 10 percent of the total ports in the market.
Ramsay admits there have been some technology issues, but believes these have now been worked through by the carriers.
