Porting Charges

I can't imagine that there is too much effort, or costs, in porting over a service and yet it is a common charge by most VoIP providers who will often gain years of income from a new subscriber. Sometimes the charge is so high that it will take years to claw back the porting cost against the lower call costs. How is that justified?

And yet if you don't port in cherished numbers and select a group of new numbers from a pool of numbers available from the provider, there is no charge although none will be "nice" numbers with anything half "decent" costing many hundred of pounds, if not thousands. Anyone care to defend, IMHO, this nice little earner by suppliers?

Explained here what the charges can pay for:
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/consultations-and-statement...

As for "decent" numbers costing more, that's supply and demand for you. If you want a quick but not particularly brilliant meal to fill your tummy, go to <insert name of fast food outlet here> and pay a few pounds, if you want a luxury dining out experience with top quality food, go to a Michelin star restaurant and pay hundreds or thousands.

trolleybus

Simplified answer. Is ported numbers cost the Voip operator.

More complex answer below.

There is some cost to building a new number as opposed to just allocating the next from a prebuilt block.

An owned range will be a 1000 or 10000 block, every ported number has to be built separately in billing and the Home register.. (Operators used to 'cheat' and just route everything to BT then just look at the porting prefix that came back but this is now frowned upon as OFCOM changed the ways calls cost.

For smaller operators this all tends to be a semi manual process and people cost. For larger ones they will have automated the process but that also costs so they need pay back.

It also costs the porting operator when setting up the porting prefix and some of this is charged to the VOIP supplier.
Each call to the number will also raise a charge so operators have to balance wanting the customer and the costs of having a ported number. Many people switching to VOIP are low users so the charges are to try to dissuade people from porting the number so the operator doesn't have to pay for terminating ported calls with little revenue to cover this.

For the owned range the block sits with any unused numbers given Number unobtainable and it is a single change to link it to your 'identity' every time you turn you phone/app on it authenticates and calls are routed to your 'discovered' IP address. Same (sort of) software as a mobile phone system and all automated.

Thank you for your responses guys; this was a business question not a domestic one where it would be realistic to say that income to the hosting provided would be low.

Now let me put this to you. There are four regular land line numbers to be ported over to VoIP. It is estimated that the call spend will be say £50 a month plus a "rental;" for each number. Would a manual administration task take more than hour to move these four lines across, I somehow doubt it. I was shocked with the advertised admin fee, but let's see how much you would consider to be reasonable.

In reply to a post by trolleybus:

Thank you for your responses guys; this was a business question not a domestic one where it would be realistic to say that income to the hosting provided would be low.

Now let me put this to you. There are four regular land line numbers to be ported over to VoIP. It is estimated that the call spend will be say £50 a month plus a "rental;" for each number. Would a manual administration task take more than hour to move these four lines across, I somehow doubt it. I was shocked with the advertised admin fee, but let's see how much you would consider to be reasonable.

I can tell you now the actual cost to port the number is very low the rest is mark up by the VOIP provider.