Please port my number to pfingo

In this week’s Digital Life, I ran a story about how VOIP services like pfingo, Skype and mediaring are now moving to the mobile phone. The value proposition is simple – you can pay two to four cents per minute to make calls from your mobile phone in Singapore to any mobile or landline number here. Compared to the 15 cents per minute we are paying, it’s pretty amazing.

The stumbling block used to be the high cost of data charges because you are essentially logging into the 3G/3.5G mobile Internet (which works out to be about 40-50 cents per minute – that’s because the bit rate is about 16kbps so when you talk for a minute that means you will be using like 16 x 60 divided by 8 which gives you 120 KB. Since the rate is about .35 cents per KB of data, you end up paying 40-50 cents per minute of VOIP talk time.

But now, with unlimited 3G plans going for like $19 and StarHub bundling their 3G and cable broadband together, mobile data access is now affordable.

I have been using pfingo a lot recently, which gives me a prefix-3 number for free. So I can call from my mobile using pfingo, and the experience is just like making a normal mobile call. Instead of pressing the green call button I press options then Internet call. I can even open my normal phone book and do the same thing to call a contact. No fuss like Skype where you have to crack your head to import contacts over.

Iam paying like $100 to $120 per month to my mobile operator for my phone bill. With these VOIP mobile services I can seriously cut my phone bill. The problem is I think you can’t port your mobile number to a VOIP mobile service. When that happens, you can be sure I will make the switch.

Need for “fuller” number portability?

As a letter writer in the ST Forum mentioned today, full number portability in Singapore does not mean you can switch from a post-paid to a pre-paid plan when you switch cellphone operators, and still keep your number.

It was pointed out that, number port exercises elsewhere, like in Hong Kong, allow for this to happen.

It’s interesting where this goes. Though the number of people switching from post-paid to pre-paid may not be as big (most pre-paid customers don’t really care to retain their numbers – they are more interested in call rates), you’d ask why this was not worked into the whole exercise.

Is it a technical problem or more based on what telcos think the market needs?

Expect IDA to come back with a reply, and hopefully, the portability could be extended to people switching from post-paid to pre-paid as well.

For now, one workaround, though a little troublesome, would be to switch from post-paid to pre-paid within the same telco, then later jump onto a new telco by doing a pre-paid to pre-paid port.

UPDATE: my suggested workaround doesn’t work, coz telcos do not even port post-paid to pre-paid lines. thanks for pointing it out, gabriel.