eircom signs up for "seamless" interoperator LLU movement

damien

Seems eircom have just announced they will agree to an inter-operator LLU transfer process. Means that you no longer have to cancel with UTV, move back to eircom and then sign up for Smart or Magnet but just sign up and all the jiggery-pokery will be done in the background. With number portability too it apparently will mean no downtime at all for customers. Time will tell.

They still won't do intra-operator moves so mass migration ain't going to happen and ComReg haven't the stomach to fight them on this. So it means BT can't move all their bitstream customers to LLU without disruption. Clever that.

Tuesday, 6th March 2007: eircom today announced plans to significantly expand existing local loop unbundling (LLU) services on offer to telecom operators in Ireland. The enhancements, known as inter-operator migrations, will increase competition in the marketplace and follow other recent LLU developments by eircom. This decision has been taken unilaterally by the company in an effort to break the gridlock on this difficult issue. Broadband is critical for Ireland, as it becomes a knowledge economy and eircom is keen to help other operators develop broadband offerings that will deliver a range of services.

The process will allow competitors to migrate existing broadband customers between operators, including the entire eircom customer base, and deliver services using LLU. All market justified volume requests will be met. It will result in a minimal interruption of service, expected to be a number of hours, but customers will not be required to change their telephone number when switching operators.

This is a direct result of another important LLU milestone reached earlier this year by eircom. Since 15 January 2007, fully operational number portability (GLUMP) allows customers to retain their telephone number when they change broadband providers. This product development was achieved through the co-operation of an industry forum, set up following requests from other operators. The product was first introduced on a manual basis in August 2006 and a number of automated enhancements, and volume increases have now been provided this month.

jesus_thats_gre

Why were the mobile operators forced to introduce Number Porting in a few years ago while the landline operators, specifically Eircom, are allowed to **** about so much?

thefinalstage

Didn't Eircom agree to something similar to this a few yars ago? I can't help but hope it works as expected although I won't hold my breath.

Tom Young

I find the eircom release absolutely ridiculous. Two market exists now and seven years too late. Thanks a lot.

You've done nothing more than band aid a deep and bloody wound.

Mobile Portability versus Fixed

Time scales in Ireland for fixed were earlier than July 2003, the mandated date for cutover of mobile portability. At the time the mobile operators clubbed together and gold plated a seamless solution, which works quite effectively. There was a few reasons for this in my mind: Exclusion of fixed operators by a highly expensive, innovative solution and more/deeper complexity in MSISDN and other mobile related user data.

Fixed portability was ill conceived and much as it annoys me to admit this, the broken process was not eircom's fault entirely. Other factors come into play such as portability database administration and commercial modelling.

Tom