In exactly eight weeks, and ending the possibility of a government-sponsored lawsuit, number portability will debut in the Cayman Islands.

On 31 January, after more than seven years of fitful struggle, negotiation and argument, Cayman’s four leading telephone companies — LIME, Digicel, Telecayman and WestTel — will unveil “local number portability” (LNP), enabling users of both cellphones and land lines to switch service providers, yet retain their telephone numbers.

The service, commonplace elsewhere, is credited with improving customer service, spurring innovation and better technology, and lowering call rates, but local companies have dragged their feet for years, claiming the service is expensive, inefficient and unnecessary in the tiny Cayman Islands market.

“We are now getting ready, and the end of January sounds about right,” said Mark Connor, acting managing director of telecommunications, regulator of the Information and Communications Technology Authority.

He said two-pronged portability, for both land lines and cellphones, was “not that unusual” elsewhere, and that the authority had always wanted to include both in the plan, which bears significant costs to the companies.

Frans Vanderdries, chairman of the seven-member Number Portability Consortium – comprising executives from the operators — said costs of implementation “were on the order of millions”, suggesting that expenses of $1 million cited by one Digicel executive “sound a little low for an individual company.

“I can‘t say what it will cost consumers, but for the industry it was millions,” he said, ”but it’s what consumers want and so, yes, it is worth it.”

As early as August 2004, A.L. Thompson wrote to the ICTA supporting number portability, saying his “Home Depot” company wished to change its Cable & Wireless provider, but was blocked by “the inability to transfer our main telephone number”, a lament echoed throughout the history of the project by other businesses such as Applebys, Cayman Data Systems, Acorn Publishing and the Andro Group.

Despite significant ICTA correspondence and press statements to the contrary, Mr Vandendries, LIME vice president for legal, regulatory and corporate affairs, said his company had “been pushing portability for a long time, We wanted it,” he said.

However, as far back as December 2004, LIME forerunner Cable & Wireless wrote that it believed “LNP is not necessary in the Cayman Islands in order to foster a competitive market”, saying “the introduction of LNP would entail a major transformation of networks and processes in the Cayman Islands”, and concluding that “C&W does not believe or agree that LNP is required in the Cayman Islands.”

Digicel CEO Victor Corcoran told iNews Cayman that “porting” a cellphone number would require 48 hours, and a land line almost one week. He downplayed the service, however, suggesting that because Digicel had already captured half the mobile-telephony market, he did not anticipate an enormous migration of customers.

“We have been successful so far and I don’t expect that to change. We will continue to concentrate on offering the best service possible.”

He said the next step for the company would be to challenge LIME’s dominance of “local loop on bundling”, supplying internet directly to homes using the older company’s copper-wire network.

Mr Vandendries also declined to predict how many people might use number portability to change providers, saying “I have no idea, it’s hard to say.”

On 1 December last year, after a series of complaints from four telephone companies about the complexity of implementing number portability, the ICTA agreed to extend a previous November deadline for the service to 1 July this summer, but subsequently refused a second extension, unable, it said, to identify “any substantial or procedural reason”.

The possibility of a lawsuit had briefly loomed after the companies missed the deadline, although the ICTA was reluctant to proceed.

In the Caribbean, the Dominican Republic has had number portability since September 2009 and Mexico since July 2008, Canada has offered the service since March 2007 and the US since November 2003. Five African nations already boast the scheme.