Wired reports number portability is finally coming to cellular customers in November 2003. Cellular providers have resisted this for a long time for obvious reasons — both the cost of providing this service and the fact that their customers would no longer be hostages to their lousy service. After Sprint complained, the FCC gave them a year’s reprieve for this requirement that was originally intended to go into effect this month. With Michael Powell at the helm of the FCC, I’m actually surprised he is doing this to his chums at the telecomm giants at all. I’ll believe it when I see it.

Wired

cites what I find an amazing statistic of a 30% annual ‘churn rate’ — the number of customers who change providers — even without the ability to preserve their numbers. The cellular companies used that fact to argue that customers don’t need number portability, but a good proportion of those who switch these days may be doing it not because of dissatisfaction with their providers as, in a sense, their providers’ dissatisfaction with them (grin) — by which I mean they may be the customers who get shut off for not paying their bills rather than customers whose lifestyle or business depends on the stability of their contacts being able to reach them at a consistent number. Number portability may indeed open as yet unforseen floodgates.

I don’t know if I’m lucky or just masochistic; while I admit that having to tell everyone in my address book of a new number would have been an enormous disincentive to switching, I have kept my cellular provider and my cellular number without the temptation to switch ever since I first contracted for service in 1993. I don’t think my standards are low; I just haven’t been dissatisfied with either the customer support and technical assistance I’ve gotten or the quality of my signal (since going from analogue to digital years ago, I can count the number of dropped calls on the fingers of one hand), but maybe I’m just dense and don’t know what I’m missing. Could the best be yet to come? I do look forward with curiosity to seeing if the threat of a switch brought about by this regulation does improve my service.