­There will soon be one million ported numbers in New Zealand; with the milestone due to be reached in late November or early December if recent activity levels continue, according to the NZ Telecommuncations Forum.

Number Portability recently celebrated its fifth birthday in April, and the Forum notes that to hit one million numbers in such a short space of time is quite an achievement. It is likely that this milestone will cap off a very busy year for Number Portability.

For the past six months there have been new networks and service providers added to the system constantly, with at least two pieces of work on at any one time. In addition, the IPMS recently successfully tested the transition to its Disaster Recovery site, when the main hardware was taken down and relocated to a new data centre.

The shift required the efforts of almost 30 companies, including software support and hardware hosts to accomplish and resulted in a successful transition with a minimal after-hours outage. The Forum now expects that users can be sure that in the event of a real disaster, portability will continue to operate even if the main IPMS hardware is completely destroyed.