Mobile Number Portability (MNP) in India

Mobile Number Portabiblity (MNP) is going to be introduced in India in December 2010 after prolonged delays. MNP is a service by which the customer will be able to retain his number (MSISDN) even after changing his

subscription from one operator/service provider to other. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI)released the MNP regulations on 23 September 2009, though it initiated the MNP introduction procedures as early as July 2005 with the release of consultation papers.

History of MNP

One of the earliest implemetations of number portability was for landline phones in Hong Kong in 1996, introduced as a tool for reversal of franchised monopoly, which was a government policy. In the USA number portability was introduced in 1998 to increase competition in a highly monopolised landline phone market. The idea porting of landline numbers, known as Local number portability was 'ported' to mobile phone networks under the nomenclature MNP. In 1999, Hong Kong (again!) became one of the earliest countries to introduce MNP.

Procedures for porting your number

The procedures mentioned is this section is as per TRAI guidelines as of December 2010, and is subject to change as and when TRAI wishes.

TRAI has specified the procedures for porting a number from one operator to other. It starts when you fall for a really cool tariff plan (like DoCoMo's 1 Ps/sec plan) or a sweeping ad campaign (like Vodafone Zoozoos). Or may be your new house or office area is not covered well by your present operator. You now want to change your operator but you want to keep the number, may be because it is a well circulated number in your business circles or may be you simply love your number because it 'rhymes' with your girlfriend's number.

You initiate the procedures by making a written request to the operator to whom you wish to port (Recipient operator). You need to clear off all dues with your present operator. If you have a prepaid number you don't have to worry about clearing dues; your balance will be forfeited. Your written request form shall be accompanied with all necessary identification documents and your last bill, if you are a postpaid subscriber. The recipient operator will then verify the documents and if found satisfactory will ask you to send an SMS to some short code towards your present operator (Donor operator). You will get an automated reply back with a unique porting code. You need to add this code in your porting request form. You need to pay some porting charges which won't exceed Rs.19. The recipient operator now will intimate the MNP service provider (managers of the central MNP database. Telstra and Syniverese are the MNP service providers in India.) about the request within 24 hours. They will check the eligibility for porting (90 days of active period in the present network and absence of pending porting requests), after which it will intimate the donor operator of the porting request. The donor will assess the request and if found valid will intimate the MNP service provider of the same within 24 hours. Now the latter will complete the porting procedures within 36 hours. The recipient operator will let you know when the porting will be finished. When the intimated time arrives, the MNP service provider will ask the donor operator for disconnection and within 1 hour will ask the recipient operator to start services for the ported number. There, you have now successfully ported from one operator to other. Very simple, eh? :P

Call flow of a ported number

There are several ways to implement MNP. In India, it is done by a horizontal approach using a central database as against a vertical approach which is accomplished by changes in protocol layers.

The backbone of the horizontal approach is a standalone Number Portability Gateway (NPG), a central database which carries the Local Routing Number (LRN) of all mobile subscribers in the country. The LRN is a 4-digit unique number which represents a particular network. For example if the LRN of Mumbai MTNL is 1234, all mobile subscribers of it will have the LRN 1234, irrespective of the porting status of the number. In other words, if a mobile number gets ported, the call routing is accomplished by changing it's LRN to that of the recipient operator.

I will illustrate this with an example. Let's consider a random fictional guy: plumber Mukesh Ambany with the mobile number 9999100100. He is using Reliance GSM network in Mumbai which let's say it has the LRN 5678. Now he wants to change his subscription to MTNL (LRN=1234) because of any of the reasons I cited above, or may be because he has some differences with his brother in allowing mutual competition and selling of shares before offering to each other, whatever that means. Anyway currently whenever another random guy called Anil make calls to him (or anybody for that matter), the call is diverted from the Mobile Switching Center (MSC, telephone exchange for mobile phones) to a STP (Signalling Transfer Point) which has LRN database of all mobile subscribers. Please note that this STP, managed by individual operators (Anil's operator, in this case) periodically updates the database with that at the NPG. The STP will attach the LRN (5678) ahead of Mukesh's 10-digit mobile number and send the digits 56789999100100 back to the MSC. The MSC then routes the call to the network corresponding to the digits 5678, that is to Mumbai Reliance GSM. Please note that pre-MNP implementation, the digits are routed according to the digits 9999, which corresponds to Mumbai Reliance GSM. After MNP is implemented, it will be impossible to say so, because his number will still be 9999100100, but he may be using some other network. After Mukesh has ported his number to Mumbai MTNL, the LRN for his number changes to 1234 (LRN of Mumbai MTNL) at the NPG and subsequently in all STPs. Now when Anil makes the call the STP returns the number 12349999100100 to the MSC. The MSC now routes the call to Mumbai MTNL corresponding to the digits 1234. The call now reaches Mukesh, he cuts the call with a smirk, Anil hears the "yeh MTNL number vyasth hai" announcement instead of a Reliance announcement and he goes WTF.

Scope of MNP in India

I will do a point-wise approach in this section.

The fors:

1. The subscriber gets to change his operator without changing his number, which may be important to him.

2. There is scope for more even competition at the market, because operators will have to satisfy the subscribers so that they won't leak out. The statistical figures of MNP may have to be made public, which will expose the operators whom the subscribers are deserting and that won't be a good advertisement.

3. A trivial one. MNP is implemented in a large number of countries and India, the world's fastest growing market of mobile phones will be left out of the league if MNP is not implemented.

The againsts:

1. MNP implementation and testing are very cumbersome exercises, especially in India with over 300 operators spread in 23 telecom circles. The operators are forced to spend a hell lot of time, dough and manpower (which could be used for better QoS instead) for implementing this regulatory necessity. For the mammoth testing exercise held in September-October 2010 which lasted more than a month, each operator had to test call and SMS to all other operators in India.

2. Its not possible to port a number to a operator in another circle. While that decision makes sense, because that would complicate call routing and billing, for people changing their numbers when they travel to other cities for long duration, MNP is totally useless.

3. MNP's impact has been minimal in most of the countries. According to a report in Voice n Data, "Around the world, MNP has been a mixed bag of success and failure... While it has worked in markets like Hong Kong and Australia, it failed to bear fruit in the UK, France, Germany, Pakistan, Ireland, Malta, among others." A ZDNet report however states that Vodafone Australia claims mobile number portability to be a regulator-driven failure that cost his company AU$50 million. "We spent $50 million putting it in place and no-one is using it", says Vodafone Australia's managing director, Grahame Maher. However the rival Australian operators Telstra and Optus seemed to be happy about it, claiming customer gains, but failing to give figures on customer gains and leakages. According to a report by Telecom Asia, a study by UK-based research firm Analysys concluded that MNP has failed to take off in most parts of the world despite its important role as an "enabler of open competition." A Top Tech News report cites Analysys stating that MNP has largely failed in most countries that have implemented it. As per their studies, in most countries in which MNP is implemented, even 10% of the subscribers did not use it. The key culprits, according to Analysys, are the high charges involved with transferring numbers, long delays in the process, and a sheer lack of awareness that MNP is available.

4. I would analyse the key causes of MNP failure as found by Analysys: The high charges involved with transferring numbers, long delays in the process, and a sheer lack of awareness that MNP is available.

a. High charges: In India the charges for porting will not exceed Rs.19, as per a directive from TRAI. But in Haryana, the first circle in India to implement MNP, the directive is already being twisted by charging Rs.10 for the porting validation SMS to the number 1900. While its not too much of an amount, especially considering the early proposed charge of Rs.300 the hidden charges will scare away the customers.

b. Delays: The porting delay is expected to be at most 84 hours in India, as per the directive, which itself is too much of time, considering the porting time in other countries: 2 hours only in USA, as low as 20 minutes in the Republic of Ireland, 3 minutes in Australia and even a matter of seconds in New Zealand.

c. Lack of awareness: As per a survey by Nielsen India, 18% of Indian mobile customers said that they would change their operator if they have the ability to retain their number. A quarter of Reliance and Tata said they would change their operator post-MNP. That’s huge.

The important fact however is that 17% of all Indian mobile customers were planning to change their operator pre-MNP itself. (Refer to the comparison chart) That means an increased interest of just 1%. The 17% people would very well throw away their current SIM and get another one of their preference, like they have been doing before MNP rollout. This is another factor. How many people love their number so much that they would prefer to go through the lengthy porting procedure instead of getting a new SIM and letting others know of the new number by SMS or something? As far as publicity is concerned, MNP has been in news for quite some time due to the lengthy and often postponed rollout procedure; so many people already should have heard of it. Idea has already started airing ads on MNP asking people to "switch to Idea", making it to look like a service they are offering. BSNL went one step ahead by offering stuff like free talktime to people porting in. Good strategy, I'd say. But speaking of the MNP scenario in the USA, Analysys states that "most top tier carriers hopped on the MNP advertising bandwagon when the concept was first introduced in 2003 but hopped back off almost as quickly. Since advertising the MNP option didn't make a major impact on consumers' decisions to port their numbers most carriers decided they would rather spend their budget advertising new phones and price plans." That is exactly what is going to happen in India too.

Obviously the cons outweigh the pros. I have been working closely with an operator for MNP implementation and testing, and I have to say that the time, money and manpower spent on MNP is not worth it. TRAI should have done enough feasibility studies to understand the massive effort the whole rollout would require in a unique case like India with about 300 operators spread in 23 circles and the possible impact of the service. I'd like to wind this up with a quote by Colonel (retd), S. N. Aggarwal, a Delhibased consumer activist. "MNP is going to be a mess. There is absolutely no coordination between TRAI and the operators."