This blog is by Rob, President of Junction Networks
In a perfect world, if you decided to leave your current carrier and move your service to a new provider, like OnSIP, you could simply call up your carrier and let them know. They would kindly say good-bye and provide all the necessary info to let OnSIP take over your number. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. Instead, the process looks something like this:
It’s a mess. I’ll spare you the details by not showing a close-up. (A hint for small business: When you have to put steps in the process titled “WAIT” - see bottom left corner of white-board - you have a problem.) Now, to be fair, losing carriers is not the main problem. The actual mechanics of the process involve a lot of paperwork, signatures, proof of number ownership, blah, blah, blah.
Corrie, who handles number porting, spends a lot of time pushing paperwork around between customers and carriers. As a company, we have gone out of our way to make a business that involves very little paperwork signatures, contracts, etc. But, as our growth has accelerated, porting numbers, or the LNP process, has kind of gotten out of hand.
So, we are reengineering it. We won’t be able to fix the inter-carrier mess that causes a huge percentage of our port requests on behalf of customers to get rejected. But, we will improve the back and forth between our customers and us so they will be better informed of the steps and the status of their requests at all times.
Stay tuned as we work to get this mess off my white-board!