A very secret affair

TUCKED away from public scrutiny — using a nondisclosure agreement as “a veil of secrecy” — is the Number Portability Company (NPC), which acts as a type of automated clearing bureau of cellular and fixed-line phone numbers.

The NPC is owned jointly by Vodacom, MTN, Cell C, Telkom and Neotel, each of which owns 20% and has board seats. The opaque company was set up in July 2006, a few months before consumers were given the ability to retain their phone numbers when they switched networks.

This week, the NPC’s general manager, Clive Fagan, refused to provide financial statements or answer questions about how it is run.

“Regrettably, as we are a private company equally owned by Cell C, MTN, Vodacom, Neotel and Telkom, we are not obliged to disclose our financials,” he said. “Also, in terms of nondisclosure agreements I am not at liberty to answer most of the questions posed.”

He said that to answer questions in detail he would need unanimous shareholder approval.

Fagan’s response, however, seems to contradict what the NPC’s shareholders have said.

Telkom said in its 2013 annual report that although it had board representation at NPC “decisions taken by the company do not require unanimous consent from investors”.

This veil of secrecy is unlikely to sit well with regulator Icasa, which announced this week that it had launched an investigation into the state of competition in the telecoms sector, which will no doubt probe whether collusion is taking place.

The NPC’s main job is to administer a database used to track the complicated porting of numbers from one service provider to another.

The ability to port numbers was meant to give consumers more options, but its arrival in 2006 proved to be a damp squib.

From November 2006 to last month a little more than 2 million subscribers ported their mobile numbers, according to the NPC website.

This is a drop in the ocean compared with the number of cellular service subscribers — nearly 71.2 million. Vodacom has 30.9 million, MTN 25.7 million, Cell C 13 million and Telkom Mobile 1.5 million. On March 31 last year, Telkom Group had 3.8 million telephone access lines in service.

But the average number of numbers ported every month is only 23 321.

The few numbers ported is no indication that customers are happy with their network operator.

Even company executives will admit that until now the packages and call rates offered by the four big cellphone operators are not really providing flexibility of choice.

This suggests that customers are sticking with the devil they know.