MNP In India

Are you sick of your operator?  Does your operator have poor coverage? Frequent call drops? Helpless customer care? That’s so embarrassing, right? You may want to switch the network for a while, but you can’t do it. Reason is you can’t afford to change your mobile number.

College students try to get cheapest rates and they don’t mind changing their number frequently. But for a professional, it’s a big pain to convey new number to everyone and update it. Plus no one can guarantee whether new network will satisfy your needs.

MNP is the solution. MNP stands for Mobile Number Portability. With this feature, one could switch the operator, without change of mobile number. Great, isn’t it?

Well well, unfortunately, we’re not that lucky yet. MNP is not active in India till date. Announced in June 2008, arrival of MNP is st ill awaited. It has been two years and TRAI is still postponing the launch of MNP.

Why is MNP important in Indian scenario? As of now, more than 15 GSM operators and 4 CDMA operators are live. Not all have good service in all places. Someone may find particular network problematic in a particular area. Consumers especially care about pricing of plans and talktime, call drops and quality of customer service. MNP will alert all operators to keep up with quality at the best possible price. Otherwise networks giving poor service will lose customers!

So, we agree that MNP is a pro-consumer move. But then, why is it still not here? No one has a proper answer. In a recent press release, TRAI ( India’s regulatory authority) said that BSNL Mobile and Uninor are not ready for it. It is required for a cellular company to perform some tests and evaluations for MNP service. And not just once, MNP launch has been postponed for 4 or more times. What can be the reason? Most likely, the leading operators (Airtel/Vodafone/BSNL/Tata/Idea) are afraid of losing their customers? This is exactly the reason why MNP should be launched as soon as possible. Because we , the consumers, pay to the operator, and it must stand up to our expectations.

Everyone is is expecting launch of MNP in 2010. So keep your fingers crossed! Soon you would be able to switch between operators, with the same number!