Speaking on the one-year anniversary of the introduction of mobile number portability, Vodafone Australia's managing director, Grahame Maher, told ZDNet Australia "we spent $50 million putting it in place and no-one is using it".
"The major point from our perspective of [mobile number portability] is that it was regulator thinking rather than customer thinking," said Maher. "The bottom line is we spent AU$50 million and nothing's changed. It hasn't been a success from a competition perspective".
Maher's remarks stand in stark contrast to comments from rival telcos Telstra and Optus, both of whom lauded mobile number portability as a key initiative in the deregulation of the telecommunications marketplace.
A year ago mobile number portability was introduced in Australia. It was labelled one of the most significant drivers in the push towards full market deregulation. With consumers able to keep their phone number when switching mobile carriers, the argument went, barriers to competition in the industry would be lowered.
Maher said the number of customers who switched suppliers had stabilised after an early period of tumult following the advent of mobile number portability. "We lost customers in the first six months...that was mostly service providers rather than individual customers," he said. Service providers who owned customers would switch all their clients from one carrier to another when offered a better deal or a rebate, and the customer kept their own number and often didn't even know the carrier had changed, according to Maher.
"The initial stuff was just the industry settling," he said. "For the last six months we've seen the same number of people go and come, so 1,000 a week go and 1,000 a week come."
Telstra yesterday issued a press release "welcoming" the anniversary of mobile number portability, and claiming significant customer gains, although it failed to reveal whether the company had lost more customers through mobile number portability than it had gained.
“Thanks to mobile number portability, consumers have more freedom to benefit from the array of services available by choosing those that best suit their budget, location, business needs or personal preferences,” said Christian Tuerk, general manager, Strategy and Business Development, in the statement.
“Telstra fully supports fair and effective competition in the Australian mobile marketplace. We believe that competition brings innovation, quality, choice and competitive prices to consumers.”
Optus also touted new customers, but also claimed to be winning in the mobile number portability stakes.
"We are porting more customers in than out and more significantly, we are gaining higher-value customers," said Peter Acheson, director business mobile for Optus in the statement. "The average value of customers porting-in is 20 percent higher than those leaving us."
What Vodafone should be saying is "No-one is porting to us because we dont offer good products or good coverage"