Excessive pricing from the country’s incumbent provider of 0800, 0861 and 0860 numbers will see call centres, large corporates and other businesses porting these numbers come 07 March 2022. That’s according to Shannon Swanepoel, Managing Director of independent telecoms firm Switch Telecom, as the ICASA-stipulated date from when companies will be able to port their well-advertised and much-valued 0800, 0860 and 0861 numbers, draws near.

“We expect significant porting in favour of more agile and transparent operators without complicated and excessive cost structures that lend themselves to unnecessarily inflated phone bills,” she says.

As an example, Swanepoel explains that many clients have been held hostage to the incumbent provider because they were unable to port their toll-free and smartaccess numbers, all the while being charged inflated rates to redirect incoming calls to both the incumbent; and other operators’ geographic number ranges.

In addition; clients that have these numbers also pay line rentals, area-based routing fees and often an additional fee for golden numbers which add to disproportionate communications bills.

Now that the transfer of non-geographic numbers from one operator to another is set to become a reality, Switch Telecom will be able to save call centres, corporates and many other businesses 50% to 90% on these charges alone.

With little to no effort, clients with toll-free and smartaccess numbers will be able to port to Switch within a matter of days. All they will need is an applicable Switch Telecom service. Switch Telecom will continue to redirect these calls as before which means that there will not be an immediate requirement to move their telephony infrastructure and there will be no change to the client’s current operations. The only major change will be a significant decrease in their monthly telephone bill.

For a period of 6 months Switch Telecom is also offering to zero-rate the forwarding charges to clients that port their toll-free or smartaccess number onto the Switch Telecom network as long as the calls are being redirected to a landline on an operator that Switch interconnects with.

This is a win for any corporate that wants to start reducing their telephone bills by moving to a cost-effective VoIP solution but realises that the move could take a number of months to rollout.

In the short term, clients can port their non-geographic numbers to Switch for a transparent experience that will immediately result in cost savings. Thereafter, they can start planning to move all of their telephony over to a more cost-effective and advanced VoIP solution.

Switch Telecom offers a range of telecoms solutions that provide individuals, small businesses and large enterprise customers with cost savings, ease-of-use, quality, manageability and advanced functionality.

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