Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications
Thursday, Nov 20, 2003
Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications Thursday, Nov 20, 2003 |
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Telecommunications Info-Tech - Telecommunications Are your mobile nos in for a change? G. Rambabu
New Delhi , Nov. 19 CLOSE to seven-million CDMA (code-division multiple access) (until recently limited mobility-WLL) mobile subscribers across the country may have new telephone numbers very soon to bring them on par with the 20-million GSM (Global System for Mobile Communication) cellular subscribers under the new unified access service licence regime. According to official sources, since the CDMA mobile phone numbers are of eight digits at present and the GSM cellular numbers are of ten digits, efforts will have to be made to bring them on an equal footing. Each of them has a different numbering scheme although both are fully mobile services. As a result, to make a long distance call from a GSM phone one has just prefix "0", while from a CDMA phone one has to prefix the STD code. This discrepancy must be corrected, they said. The present numbering scheme for CDMA mobile is specified for a short distance charging area (SDCA), since it was introduced as a limited mobility service and is the same as that for the landlines. On the other hand, the GSM cellular numbers begin with the national area code `98' or `94' followed by a three-digit code for mobile switches and five digits for the subscriber number, a total of ten digits. In fact a couple of months ago, much before the unified licensing regime, the WLL operators had called for a change in the numbering plan of the GSM cellular services stating that it was posing difficulties in linking up both the networks which would allow the subscribers to call each other. However, this demand was rejected, as it would lead to more confusion for the cellular subscribers. Since the subscriber base of CDMA services are much lower than that of GSM services, there is now a move to change the CDMA mobile numbering scheme. This would lead to lesser confusion for subscribers.
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