Mobile Number Portability: TRAI Cuts Porting Time Within A Circle To 2 Days, To Fine Telcos For Flouting Rules

The processing time for porting requests from one circle to another has been retained at four days.

In its draft amendment regulations, 2018, aimed at making MNP more efficient and hassle-free for mobile users, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has also mandated two sets of financial disincentives for failures on the part of telcos in stick to porting request processing timelines.

For instance, a telco, the regulator said, will have to shell out a peak penalty of “Rs 5,000 per contravention” for flouting rules requiring it to share customer details with the MNP service provider within 24 hours of a customer submitting a porting request besides texting the customer about the process being initiated. The penalty doubles to Rs 10,000 per violation for “wrongful rejection” of porting requests by a telco.

The sector regulator said “porting code mismatch” and “invalid/expired codes” constituted nearly 45% of the grounds on which MNP porting requests were rejected by telcos between April 2017 and May 2018.

Since “there is no improvement in (porting request) rejections in major categories, appropriate corrective measures are required to strengthen the MNP process,” the regulator said in the draft MNP rules issued Tuesday.

Phone companies expressed dismay over Trai’s call to impose stiff penalties for non-compliance of the MNP drill.

“Penalties are extremely blunt instruments to ensure MNP compliance, and rather a partnered approach with Trai to ensure our mutual goals are met and difficulties ironed out would be the preferred approach,” said Rajan Mathews, director general of the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), which represents Vodafone Idea, Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio Infocomm.

Demand for porting requests, he said, have peaked after the closure of (fringe layers) Aircel, Telenor India and Reliance Communications amid heavy demand from customers of these companies to move to other operators.

Mathews stressed that telcos, on their part, are doing their best “to ensure customers are not inconvenienced during the MNP process and are working to put appropriate systems and infrastructure in place to comply”.

Telcos have backed TRAI’s call to make the MNP process more efficient but have repeatedly cautioned that the porting scenario in India with over a billion mobile users across 22 circles is a lot more complex than the rest of the world.

A key corrective measure suggested by the regulator is making the MNP service provider responsible for generating porting codes to make the treatment of porting requests more impartial and curb rejections.

The sector regulator said separate timelines had been kept for porting requests within a circle and from one circle to another at the suggestion of the telecom department (DoT) till the full-fledged implementation of the Central Monitoring System (CMS) networks surveillance system.

India’s upcoming automated surveillance system or `CMS’ will have the capability of tracking all forms of communications wireless, landline, satellite, internet to even voice over internet protocol calls.

“It’s anticipated that by the time the MNP process is implemented, the CMS installed by DoT would be fully operational and all concerned security agencies would be using the centralised system,” Trai said in its draft MNP regulations.

Timelines will not be advanced for porting requests of corporate mobile numbers under the revised MNP process, the regulator said.

Back in April this year, Trai kicked off a process to overhaul MNP rules to remove inconveniences faced by subscribers under the current system. MNP was first introduced in India in 2011, but was restricted to within a circle. It was expanded to users moving to another circle in 2015.

Earlier this year, the regulator had also slashed by nearly 80% to a maximum of Rs 4 the fee charged to consumers for porting from one service provider to another.

TRAI has sought stakeholder comments and counter-comments on its latest MNP draft amendment rules by October 24. – News Feed