MTN Ghana has finally decided to absorb the porting cost of $2.5 for subscribers of other telecom operators porting into MTN when Mobile Number Portability (MNP) starts on July 1, 2011. Acting Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of MTN Ghana, Clement Ofori Asante had earlier told Adom News the company was yet to decide on whether or not to absorb the porting cost, citing “market conditions and finalization of overall cost implications on all networks.” But less than two weeks for MNP to take off, Mr. Asante told Adom News in an interview “we have decided to absorb the full cost including the 12 pesewas payable to telecom operator from where the subscriber ported.” Vodafone Ghana was the first to come out and promise that it would absorb the porting fees, followed by Tigo and Airtel. Meanwhile reliable sources said Expresso is also grappling with whether to absorb the cost or not as MNP raises other cost implications for the only CDMA operator in the country. Subscribers porting from any of the five GSM operators to Expresso might have to be given new handsets by Expresso and that would be additional cost to the CDMA operator. But an industry analyst said it would not be smart for any operator to want subscribers porting into their network to bear the cost. Mr. Asante also noted that there is a quota system, which enjoined an operator to process up to 200 porting requests from one network per day no matter how many requests were from that particular operator. He said there were other factors in the porting process, such as making checks, in some cases, to ensure that the number porting could actually do so, and that could also take the process way beyond 15 minutes. He however assured the public that MTN had a semi-automated system which could process a porting request within 15 minutes, but it would be irrelevant to make promises with that since the process could as well go beyond 15 minutes. “I can assure you that by the close of July our porting system would be fully automated, but that may not necessarily affect the porting period,” he said. But Adom News can confirm that operators are required by law to process every porting request within a maximum of four hours, and experts say that would make complete nonsense of the quota system Mr. Asante referred to. Sources at the National Communication Authority (NCA) also told Adom News the daily quota could be reviewed upwards depending on whether the current 200 met consumer demands or not. “It is within our power to review it to 300 or 400 per day depending on the number of requests recorded per day,” the source said. "As the quota goes up those with automated systems may not need more hands but those with manual or semi-automated systems will need more staff to process requests." Meanwhile all the operators have gone through a rigorous exercise to make changes in their interconnect to accommodate routing calls to ported numbers smoothly in the signaling paths between networks. More testing are also being done as operators approach the final lap for the launch of MNP. Story by: Samuel Nii Narku Dowuona/Adom News/Ghana