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After many delays and a trial run in Haryana, it was finally launched in January 2011 by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal.
Nearly three years on, however, Mobile Number Portability is yet to take off in India. As of October 2013, just 10 per cent of users had sought to port their numbers — not an encouraging sign for a telecom market with nearly a billion subscribers, many of whom frequently opt for new connections.
Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) data released in December reveal that the number of portability requests stood at 104.79 million as of October 2013. Karnataka topped the list with about 12.06 million requests followed by Rajasthan (10.44 million), Andhra Pradesh (9.52 million) and Gujarat (9.09 million).
As the name suggests, Mobile Number Portability allows a telecom subscriber to switch to a different operator even while retaining his phone number.
“From the customer’s point of view, the results are not on expected lines. Lack of willingness on operators’ part, early failure around technology and a lack of consumer awareness were among the reasons for number portability lacking enthusiasm,” says Kamlesh Bhatia, research director at advisory firm Gartner.
Thus far, portability was allowed only within a circle. Soon, the government plans to enable portability on a national basis, across India’s 22 telecom circles.
“Number portability has its limitations in India, which is pre-dominantly a pre-paid subscriber market,” says Bhatia.
About 97 per cent of India’s 875.48 million wireless subscribers use pre-paid connections. When they want to switch operators, most opt for a new connection instead of porting it.
Subscriber base Internationally, mobile number portability is a measure of maturity of a telecom market and amounts to about 3-5 per cent of the total subscriber base every month. In India it is way below 1 per cent.
“There is also an element of artificiality. Subscribers are using portability to bargain with operators for better tariffs, schemes, discounts. And retail distributors are also helping in the churn of customers to earn commissions,” says Rajan S. Mathews, Director-General of GSM operator lobby, Cellular Operators’ Association of India (COAI).
“Looking at the formal requests, mobile number portability has only been moderately successful in India,” says Jaideep Ghosh, partner at KPMG Advisory Services, explaining that operators, too, “were not keen” on taking in low-revenue users.
“The usage of multiple SIMs (dual SIMs and in some cases triple SIMs) has also had an impact. They use it for certain purposes, such as one SIM for incoming and another for outgoing calls, ” adds Ghosh. The country is now gearing up to roll out national mobile number portability.
This will enable users to port numbers across the country, irrespective of the circle they move to.
“This time, full mobile number portability is being launched more to help people moving from one State to another. So, churn will not be an issue as not even 1 per cent of the total subscriber base relocates to another State,” says COAI’s Mathews.
The launch of 4G services will increase the focus on data, and while new users will be added, data usage, as such, would not help mobile number portability, adds KPMG’s Ghosh.
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