The Hindu Business Line : Divergent views on mobile number portability launch

New Delhi, Aug. 23 Both CDMA and GSM operators on Thursday came out in support of introducing mobile number portability but differed on the timing of the launch, which would allow subscribers to change their mobile operator without changing the number.

While Reliance Communications and Tata Teleservices have written to the Communication and IT Minister, Mr A. Raja, urging the Government to introduce the platform immediately, the rival GSM camp said that number portability should be introduced at a later stage as the priority at the moment was to increase the tele-density of the country.

Number Portability

“Number portability is a very important and effective tool for ensuring competition in the telecom services market. Implementation of mobile number portability would motivate and stimulate the service providers to constantly endeavour to further improve their quality of service in order to retain existing customers and attain new subscribers,” said Mr S.C. Khanna, Secretary, Association of Unified Telecom Services Provider of India, representing the interest of the CDMA players.

Mr T.V. Ramachandran, Director General, Cellular Operators Association of India, said: “We also support number portability. In fact, this will improve the market share of the GSM operators as subscribers of the CDMA operators may want to shift to our platform. However, at a time when the sector requires investments worth Rs 50,000 crore for improving the mobile coverage in rural areas, introducing number portability right now would prove to be a drain on the operators’ resources.”

As per COAI’s estimate, implementing number portability could cost as much as Rs 3,000 crore, which can instead be used to set up a few thousand towers in remote areas.

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