No, I didn't kill the phone too. And no, I'm not defaulting to smoke signal for communication. Not yet.

I'm a Turkcell customer for probably about 10 years or a bit more. The network worked great, almost all the time. Turkcell is an awesome example if I ever decide to build an operations company, all around.

But their premium pricing is not good enough, and now that I depend even more on my phone for communication since I've killed pretty much every other method, it became costly. But it's not critical enough for ~$100/month item in my operational cost. I'll happily accept 5% call drop rates, 20% slower internet etc. in exchange for a 50% discount; because my communication is not that critical. Realizing that, I thought, maybe I should try and experience how mobile number portability works in Turkey firsthand.

After checking prices and packages, I settled on Avea, a long time Telenity customer. Almost all of their mobile messaging infrastructure runs on Telenity software. So I took a visit, but finding an Avea dealer is not easy, not as widespread as Turkcell. They obviously have a database on their website, but I went to the closest but the dealer store was closed for renovation.

The experience was smooth. It took about 2 mins for the nice guy at the dealer to fill out the form for me, I read the agreement briefly and signed here and there, took my new SIM and left without paying a dime. Apparently I'll get a text message soon that tells me when to switch SIM cards. After the switch, I'll be back again with the same number in Avea network, paying about $25 a month for a much larger communications package. Saving 75%, not that bad.

I'll try to keep you posted about my Avea experience once in a while.