Mobile Number Portability

Long wait is getting over. Soon all the Indians will be blessed with this fantastic service, mobile number portability, which will enable a subscriber to retain the number while changing the service provider.

Being a technical person working in the Telecom domain, I had been part of the system/software upgrade that the western Telecom operators were making to comply with the WNP (wireless number portability) few years back. I was so much in want of this facility in India since then. Now that it is here, I am actually a bit skeptical about it's use to the customers.

While I talk to my friends, colleagues or even when I read on twitter, everyone is complaining about their own service provider for mobile service. A vodafone customer, which I am, complains about network coverage and expensive data plans and wishes if I could go to Airtel or Idea, whereas I have seen similar complaints from Airtel or Idea customers too. I am more or less reaching to a conclusion that every provider has his own pockets of good service and bad service. So even if this mobile number portability becomes the reality in India, no single subscriber would gain and no single provider would loose. If hundreds of Airtel customers move from Airtel to say Idea, it looks like they will gain almost same number of subscribers from others.

So if you are a cribbing customer, eagerly waiting for MNP to solve your problems, you probably will continue cribbing, albeit for different provider, months from now ...

Comments

Unknown said…
Airtel MNP Offer is implemented in different ways across the globe. The International and European standard is for a customer wishing to port his/her number to contact the new network
June 01, 2013 4:27 PM
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