TRAI Amends Mobile Number Portability Regulation

Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), on Wednesday, amended its Mobile Number Portability regulation. Starting May 3, mobile subscribers would be able to port their numbers through different operators even when they relocate to different cities.

Apart from facilitating Pan-India portability, a few other changes have been made as well, which are:

1. In case a post-paid subscriber has some pending bills to pay to the donor operator (previous service provider), the donor operator would have to give a notice within 30 days of the due date of the bill. After a lapse of 60 days, the donor operator wouldn’t be entitled to raise any non-payment disconnection requests with the recipient operator (new service provider).

2. In case a post-paid subscriber defaults payment, the donor operator will request the recipient operator to disconnect the ported number, after which the recipient operator would give the subscriber a 15–day notice to the subscriber. If the subscriber defaults this period, the outgoing services will be barred from his number. If the subscriber doesn’t make the payment in another 15 days, his number would be permanently disconnected by the recipient operator.

3. The disconnected subscribers can return to their original service provider within a period of 60 days; this time-period was 90 days before this amendment.

This is to be noted that India is divided into 22 telecom circles. These are mostly bound by state; however, in some cases, one state has two different circles (like UP East and UP west) and two states are combined in one circle (like Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh).

At present, mobile subscribers can port their numbers only when they switch subscribers within their own circle. This was a result of MNP issues in India in January 2011. However, with this new change being implemented from May 3, subscribers would have the ease of retaining their number even when they move to a zone with a new telecom circle.

Image Courtesy: EconomicTimes