Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Wednesday issued additional recommendations on the Mobile Number Portability (MNP) Regulations.
Till June 2017, approximately 288 million subscribers across the country have availed MNP facility.
TRAI said its analysis for the period April, 2016 to March, 2017 indicates that average rejection of porting requests by TSPs in all the categories was about 11.16 percent and rejections on the grounds of “UPC Mismatch” and “UPC expired” constituted about 40 percent of the total rejections.
This may be due to wrong submission of UPC content by the potential subscriber at the Point-of-Sale (PoS) of Recipient Operator (RO) or by entry of incorrect UPC details at PoS of RO.
Presently, there is no mechanism available with the RO to verify the content and status of expiry date of UPC.
Hence, TRAI has proposed a process to the existing MNP process wherein content of UPC and date of validity of UPC along with the mobile number are shared by DO with respective MNP Clearing House (MCH).
The RO sends verification request containing the mobile number and UPC to the MCH who in turn shall respond back instantly to RO conveying acceptance or rejection of the porting request on the basis of the content and date of validity of the UPC, generated for the particular mobile number of the wireless consumer.
The porting application will be submitted to MCH only after UPC is cleared by MCH. Through the proposed mechanism, entry of incorrect UPC and invalid/ expired UPC can be addressed at the PoS itself.
TRAI said that this process will make porting of mobile number more convenient and shall bring greater satisfaction to the telecom subscribers. This will bring down the percentage of rejections during the MNP process.
In the existing process, Non Payment Disconnection (NPD) requests raised by the DO are submitted to RO via MCH of the MNP zone to which the mobile number range holder of number under porting belongs. In the process, DO can initiate the NPD request to RO after completion of 30 days of last date of payment.
In the existing process, there is lack of clarity at the end of MCH and RO regarding the amount outstanding in the bill, date of the bill and notice served, if any, by the DO to the subscriber.
In the revised process, the DO shall communicate the above details to RO via MCH. The MCH shall retain a copy of such information and timestamp them in its database for future reference. The entire process is expected to be fruitful in ensuring the appropriate timely action on the part of RO.
