MNP(Mobile Number Portability) in India

MNP (Mobile Number Portability) in India , Idea confirmed Haryana

Idea’s Sirji (Abhishek Bachchan) is already promoting MNP (Mobile Number Portability) on TV Ads and it is confirmed by DoT as well that finally MNP is coming in India on 25’th November 2010. Initially MNP will start from Haryana where 8 mobile operators are currently providing services. At least finally DoT is starting rolling out the most awaited feature in mobile industry i.e. MNP in India.

Update -On 25′th Nov, MNP (Mobile Number Portability) is launched in Haryaya, India by Telecom minister Mr. Kapil Sibbal. Rest of India is expected to get the service from 20′th Jan 2011.

Mobile Number Portability will let you change the service operator without changing your current mobile number. Still there is no update or confirmation about the MNP rollout in other circles. But the complete roll out is expected by March – May 2011.

Mobile Number Portability Process

As per TRAI, the new operator can charge you an amount less than or equal to Rs. 19. We will have to wait till 25’th to see how much operators charge for that. I hope that new operators may provide this service for free as they are getting new customer.

Postpaid users need to clear all pending bills before changing the operator. Once the bills are paid, they need to send a SMS to certain number and the current operator will provide a MNP key (or something similar). You just need to provide the key to the new operator at the time of registration.

Prepaid users will loose their current balance amount after changing the operator. They will also have to send SMS to that number to get the license key.

The complete portability or documents, history etc. should complete in 4 days as per TRAI. While changing the operator, deactivation and re-activation of the number should not take more than 2 hours. That means, you will be able to use your number in next 2 hours after registering to the new operator.

Well, we will have to wait to see how operators take this MNP as some of them may loose their current subscribers, and we know that none of them want so. Of course subscriber will have to face some issues as we can’t expect this kind of feature to go as smooth as it seems. Anyway, MNP is definitely a good option for subscribers i.e. us and it will get good response after the launch.