Mobile phone users will now be able to switch their telecom service provider while retaining their old number in a maximum of five days, December 16 onwards, as the new regulations on mobile number portability come into effect.
The amended rules, which provide for a penalty of up to ₹10,000 per wrongful rejection of porting request, also reduce the role that telecom operators play in the whole process.
An individual porting request within a particular service area will be completed in three working days, the Telecom regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) said on Tuesday.
The request for port out from one circle to another will be completed in five working days, TRAI said.
While the amended rules were brought out by the regulator in December last year, the implementation was delayed from the original timeline of June 2019 on the request of the service providers. Under the new process, the mobile number portability service provider (MNPSP) has been tasked with generating and communicating the unique porting code (UPC) to a subscriber, instead of the telecom service provider. A UPC is an eight digit alpha numeric code that a subscriber wanting to switch their operator needs to generate by sending an SMS to ‘1900.’
“Through these amendment regulations a major shift in the mechanism for generating Unique Porting Code (UPC) has been provisioned,” TRAI added. Now, the request for UPC will be received by the operator and instantly forwarded to the concerned MNPSP.
“The MNPSP, after conducting the requisite checks on a real time basis with the database of the Donor operator will then generate the UPC and send it to the subscriber.”
A record of the UPC will also be kept by the MNPSP, so that the porting request can be verified by the recipient operator as well.
As per estimates, the rejection of porting requests on the grounds — UPC Mismatch and Expired UPC, accounted for an average of around 45% of the total rejection of porting requests for the period April, 2017 to May, 2018. These can be brought down following the new regime.
