ISP A&A Confusingly Asks Mobile Users to Request a PAC Switch

Customers of UK broadband ISP Andrews & Arnold (AAISP), specifically those who take one of their 07 mobile numbers (normally linked to their SIP2SIM service), will shortly be asked to log-in to their account page and request a Porting Authorisation Code (PAC) to switch provider in order to avoid a tricky supplier.

At present AAISP’s 07 numbers are managed by an unnamed supplier that has been “slow … to answer any queries” and still doesn’t support some common features. Instead the ISP has decided to go with a new provider, which supports all of the features they need. However, according to the company’s MD, Adrian Kennard, their old 07 supplier has allegedly made it difficult to move their numbers on to the new platform.

“So we want to move a lot of our numbers to a new provider. We can’t actually move them all, as some cannot be ported (!). These are numbers with no incoming SMS either, which is why we tried to port them. Yes, Ofcom require porting to be agreed, and the new provider are happy to try and sort a Porting contract for those numbers, but Ofcom do not have any time limit on how long that could take. It could take years, apparently, especially with a supplier this slow at answering any queries,” said Adrian.

The ISP initially tried to setup a Bulk PAC (mass migration) process to handle the switch of supplier for hundreds of their customers at once, but the existing company wanted around £20k to cover the admin costs of issuing it (a hefty price tag for a small provider). “Basically, unless we agree to this, they won’t issue the PAC and won’t let us move … which was never agreed in the contract and is clearly unreasonable,” said Adrian.

At this point AAISP proposed to simply have customers ask for the PAC and use that, but the supplier insisted that would still be treated as a wholesale move and so the fee would continue to apply. In order to get around this they decided to setup a new company for their mobile service and turn it into a retail move, which means that Ofcom’s consumer “Text-to-Switch” (Auto-Switching) process would apply.

Adrian Kennard said:

“Obviously I am ensuring we are 100% technically correct (the best kind of correct), and am making a new company (subsidiary of A&A), and asking customers to move to that retail provider.

Once this is sorted we’ll seamlessly move customers back to A&A, no problem, but to ensure we are correct and within the OFCOM rules for issuing individual PACs for free for a “retail move”, it will be a separate company (who contract for A&A to do billing). I’ll even create the inter company billing (net zero) and file accounts for this short lived new company. All above board and proper. Total cost under £50.”

The new company that has been setup is called ((💩)) LTD and if you know your unicode decimal codes then 💩 comically converts to 💩(poo), but they may opt for a more “polite name” in the future. As a result of this Adrian believes that their existing supplier now has a choice between either handling hundreds of separate retail PAC requests, each of which must be issued within a couple of hours for free, or doing a fairly priced bulk PAC.

Suffice to say, it’ll be interesting to see how this all plays out. The biggest difficulty for AAISP is likely to be in terms of the inevitable customer confusion that will arise from making such a request, which somewhat transfers a problem with the internal business to one that customers must now help to shoulder; such things are usually best avoided.