Information Madness

For a long time, the news about MNP (Mobile Number Portability) has been ringing all doors for a while. Earlier in the mid part of 2009 it was said that it will be coming into existence. When MNP is implemented it will be advantageous for most of the people, who switches their mobile numbers often but this will be a major disadvantage for the mobile service providers to have a hold on its users.

MNP (Mobile Number Portability) means, if a user is not happy with his service provider, he can just change over to other service provider of his own choice without changing his number. Because of this, the user doesn’t need to create new business cards, and send it over SMS, emails, etc to his friends, relatives, etc. But, MNP had not come into existence until now.

Later, after few months from the mid part of 2009 there was a report from the Department of Telecom stating that MNP will no longer be a spoken concept but it will soon be implemented by the end of 2009. It was announced that it will be launched on December, then on Jan 1st 2010. But, January has gone, February has gone and now it is March but still no sign of MNP being implemented.

Now there was report saying that there is possibility that it will be working from April onwards, and that is not too far. But, even now there is news from different sources that it may be further delayed by another two to three month. The technology has to be up to the limit to build the amount of infrastructure needed for making the MNP to be a running system. But as per now we don’t have it just yet.

The country has already been split up into areas and the license for operating in Northern and Western part of India was granted to Syniverse Technologies and in the Eastern and Southern part of India to MNP Interconnection Telecom Solutions. Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has been struggling to implement it. The amount for this service is about Rs20 (amount is not yet officially announced) with all the previous dues should be paid off to the previous provider. The summary is that still the date of release not yet confirmed. So all service providers are trying to catch hold of their customers by providing new schemes like a rate of 1/2paise per second etc.

Last year, a survey was conducted by Nielson and it was found that 1/5 mobile users is ready to switch over to other service providers retaining their number. The rumours are that the delay is due to conspiracy by the many service providers who would definitely lose out if MNP were introduced.