Have you ever thought about leaving your phone service provider, only to realise that they’ve got you by the ... telephone number?

What if you could take your number with you? Well, with the implementation of local number portability, you can do just that.

When it comes to telephones, people become rather attached to their numbers. As important as retaining a number is to consumers, it is so much more so to businesses, which need their customers to be able to stay in touch. Then when you factor in the costs of reprinting business cards, letter heads and signs, plus the advertising required to let customers know that phone numbers have changed, it could become a very expensive operation, negating the potential advantages of a move.

However, after years of negotiation and planning, Cayman is on the verge of local number portability being implemented. This will allow customers to switch providers while retaining their current numbers, whether mobile or fixed line numbers. However porting, as the process of moving a number to a new provider is called, will only be available from a mobile number to a mobile number or from a fixed line number to a fixed line number, not from mobile to fixed or the other way around.

In fact, Cayman will be the first nation in the English-speaking Caribbean to implement local number portability and could potentially start a domino effect around the region. After all, once it has been implemented successfully in Cayman, what would hold back other nations in the region? Whoa, not so fast. The local implementation has to be successful first.

The focus on making it a success and making the process customer centric is what has caused the process to be oft delayed. The ease of the process will also help determine whether consumers make use of it or not. After all, if you are without a working mobile phone for days, it is likely that none of your friends would even consider taking the chance and the entire operation could fade to nothingness.

Then again, one can expect incentives from providers trying to lure customers, so it could be a great time for consumers, if not for the networks themselves.
Many consumers in Cayman have a phone on each mobile network in order to make use of cheaper in-network calls. However, the only way to tell on which network a number is, is to look at the first three digits of the number. However, once number portability steps in, it will become progressively more difficult to guess which network a number is on. If a lot of porting took place it would make cheaper on-network rates a non issue, and could see consumers move to a single mobile phone.

The only thing that is certain is that any company that has been hanging on to its customers because it has them by the phone number will find that its days are numbered.