Author: John Oates |
Vodafone is mounting a legal challenge to Ofcom's call for mobile operators to allow their customers to shift their number to another network within two hours.
It is already possible to take your number with you when you shift network but it takes a few days. Ofcom said in July last year that it wanted the process speeded up - from being one of the first countries to get operators to offer the service the UK has fallen behind.
In November Ofcom set targets of porting numbers within two days by April 2008 and within two hours by April 2009. Ofcom told operators to co-operate in building a shared database so that ported numbers are no longer reliant on their old provider to route calls.
But Vodafone has made a complaint to the Competition Appeal Tribunal saying that creating the database would be too expensive and counter-productive because it could encourage slamming - companies making commission by shifting people's providers without their knowledge.
Mobile network "3" told the Times that incumbent operators were dragging their feet at the expense of the British consumer. More from the Times.
In other news Vodafone unveiled key performance indicators showing revenues of £9.2bn in the third quarter, representing growth of 15.8 per cent (4.4 per cent organic growth). Profits were boosted by the strength of the euro against the pound.
Vodafone had 252.3m mobile customers on 31 December 2007 and 3.1m DSL customers in 11 markets.
Voice revenue for the quarter was £6.3bn, messaging revenue was £1.5bn, data brought in £558m, fixed line £474m and other service revenue brought in £10m.
For the full year Vodafone expects revenues of between £34.5bn and £35.1bn and expects adjusted operating profit of between £9.5bn to £9.9bn.
The full statement of Key Performance Indicators is available as a pdf here. Article from The Register Discuss this news article
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Vodafone takes Ofcom to court over number porting