new MNP regulation 2018 by TRAI

TRAI’s 7^th Amendment to Mobile number portability  Rules

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI)has issued Telecommunication Mobile Number Portability (Seventh Amendment) Regulations, 2018 on 13.12.2018  .

To reduce  the rejections on the grounds of "Unique Porting Code (UPC) Mismatch" and "Unique Porting Code (UPC) expired", the Authority initiated draft Telecommunications Mobile Number Portability (seventh amendment), Regulations 2017, on 16th August, 2017 for seeking comments of the stakeholders. The comments received from the stakeholders were examined and analyzed. Final Amendment Highlights are:-

Porting timeline of 2 working days has been provisioned for the requests of Intra-Licensed Service Area (Intra-LSA) numbers except the requests made under corporate category and the timelines of 4 working days has been provisioned for all the porting requests of Inter-Licensed Service Area (Inter-LSA) numbers and corporate category. Porting can be done only after 90 days of last porting.

RECRUITMENT OF SENIOR ASSISTANT(ELECTRONICS) BY  AAI

Besides above, other major changes have been incorporated such as the validity of UPC has been kept 4 days in place of 15 days earlier for all LSAs except for the LSAs of Jammu & Kashmir, Assam and North East for which the validity of UPC remains unchanged. Process for withdrawal of porting requests has been made simpler and quicker through SMS. For the cases of corporate porting, present limit of 50 numbers in single authorization letter has been enhanced to 100 numbers per authorization letter. Provisions for the Financial Disincentives have been broadened upon contravention of the provisions of MNP Regulations. Post implementation of this regulation (amendment), appropriate Quality of Service (QoS) parameters will be devised by the Authority to monitor the role of MNP SPs(Servi and Access Providers in the new scenario.

What is the Benefit to the customer?

It was observed earlier that It takes 10-15 days earlier for porting number from one operator to other operator, it was really frustrating for the customer If he is not getting proper service with existing service provider, many a times operators rejects MNP requests on various grounds like contractual obligation. Now as per amendment if a service provider rejects MNP port out request with violation of guidelines given by TRAI in its 7^th Amendment to Mobile number portability operator will be fined maximum upto 10 thousand per rejection.

What is the effect on service providers?

Due to compulsory minimum recharge by telecom operators Airtel, and Vodafone-Idea ,customers from these operators are porting out to BSNL and RJIO .With the reduction in MNP time from 15 days to 2 days in Home-LSA and 4 days in Inter-LSA port out  may increase abruptly for these two operators.