About 2.6 Million Switch Carriers
Five months into wireless number portability and the numbers are in. Apparently 2.6 million US consumers have ported numbers in that time, including Michael Powell – who said it took about an hour and went very smoothly. Meanwhile, it doesn’t look like portability is slowing down either. The report says that nearly 613,000 consumers switched between wireless carriers and another 49,000 moved a wireline number to a wireless carrier in April alone. That’s more than 25% of the total – suggesting, if anything, that the rate of switching is increasing. Of course, the cynical might wonder how many of those switches were ones that had been requested on November 24th and only came through in April…
