Over 1 billion mobile number portability requests placed since 2011

Mobile users in the country have placed over 1 billion requests for changing their operator since mobile number portability was launched in 2011.

MNP allows a telecom subscriber to retain his mobile number when switching from one service provider to another, anywhere in the country. This is supposed to be a key metric to measure churn of subscribers between telecom operators, thereby indicating the level of competition in the market.

However, experts said that the telcos have been incentivising third-party retailers to make prepaid subscribers switch mobile phone plans through commissions. These retailers are consequently urging subscribers to switch operators at a heightened frequency since they receive a commission for every switch.

As a result, the cost of acquiring a customer is needlessly rising as these commissions to retailers are not providing any tangible benefit to the subscriber numbers overall. 

• Also read: WazirX to ‘socialise’ $230 million security breach loss among customers

But the commission has been coming down over the past year. Telcos used to pay up to ₹300 earlier. This has come down to around ₹200 per port. The actual porting of numbers would have been higher if the operators did not create hurdles for users to switch operators.

Millions of MNP requests were rejected every month due to various reasons, including the original operator misleading users, withholding pending dues information, and even masquerading as the new operator executive to fraudulently reject the porting process.