India’s Mobile Number Portability - Boon for Consumers!

Mobile Number Portability (MNP), is finally been implemented in India. MNP provides the consumers and subscribers an opportunity to change their service operators while retaining their existing mobile numbers. It has become an instant success across India with the results showing 13 million subscribers changing their service operators since the day it has been implemented. It’s not every day you hear about the end-user getting most of the benefit, do you?

Hence, MNP clearly is an attempt to make the end-user happy about the services s/he wants from the service provider. It clearly gives the user a lot of benefit to the consumers as he/she need not take trouble to inform the family, friends and colleagues about a new number. The consumers get the most as they can transfer to their desired service provider without having to change their current numbers, empowering them the freedom to discard the poor quality of service by the previous operators and choose the desired service operators.

MNP is certainly a welcome surprise and it seems like a revolution of telecom wars is already taking place. The northern India witnessed Gujarat and Maharashtra with a whooping 12.98 lakh porting requests. Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh also came with maximum porting requests of 10.32 lakh down South. It goes on to show that it has had a greater impact on the common people of the country. Business users and post-paid consumers may not prefer changing the service providers but this norm seems to be diminishing with more and more business users opting for MNP.

The TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) had issued certain guidelines for consumers and Service operators in order to place a porting request. Outstanding Balance amounts which are less than ₹10 in the existing service operators will not amount to rejection of the porting requests. If you are holding any of the long term service contracts with your existing service operator, you cannot switch to the other network unless the contract period gets over. Consumers have to pay not more than Rs. 19 to avail this facility. The pre-paid service consumers can also avail this benefit.

With the start of a new phase in the telecom industry, the number of mobile phone subscribers has been steadily rising and has come to an incredible number of 885.99 million in the recent past. Let us see what it has in store for the Telecom market.