Mobile Number Portability

Subscribers must pay up all
pending bills before making an
application for Mobile Number Portability (MNP). The porting
fees is to be paid to the new
operator. No payment is required
to be given to the operator you
are leaving.
porting between mobile
operators should be
accomplished within four days.
There ’s a catch though. You
cannot switch operator and
retain number if you have been
with that operator for less than
three months. Prepaid users
must remember that their
balance talk time will disappear if
they switch to a different
operator. The maximum
downtime between deactivating
the existing connection and
starting the new connection will
be a maximum of two hours.
As for Dipping charges, the
charge will be mutually agreed
upon between a service provider
or international long distance
provider to the MNP service
provider.
Licences were provided to two
MNP Service Providers (MNPSPs)
for two zones in the country,
earlier in the year.
Dipping charges are charges that
a service provider would need to
pay to use the query response
systems of the two MNP service
providers. Service providers can
use the query response systems
to get the Location Routing
Number for routing a message to
the called number.
The MNP service provider will
need to fix the Dipping charge
thirty days from the date of
publication of these regulations
in the official Gazette.
The charge may be reviewed
after a period of one year.
The move is sure to unsettle the
market. It will generate fierce
competition between service
providers and force big ones to
improve their services. At the
same time, it will benefit new
players immensely. Several
surveys have found that about
7-10% of all mobile users are
unhappy with their current
mobile service provider.
Introduction of mobile number
portability will facilitate the easy
exit of disgruntled users. This
also means telcos will have to put
more effort to retain those
customers, who earlier stayed
loyal to the operator out of the
necessity of retaining their
number.
Mobile operators offering
telecom services in India include
state-owned BSNL and MTNL,
besides private operators like
Airtel, Reliance Communications,
Vodafone, Idea Cellular, Loop
Mobile, Aircel, MTS and Tata
Indicom/DoCoMo. Once mobile
number portability is across in
India, every operator will have to
facilitate customers ’ exit from
and entry to their networks with
the same number