The Hindu Business Line : TRAI for mobile number portability by June 2009

New Delhi, April 11 Favouring the nation-wide implementation of mobile number portability by June 2009, telecom regulator TRAI on Friday recommended that the Mobile Number Portability Clearing House Administrator (MCHA) should be licensed through a competitive bidding process.

TRAI said that in the case of pre-paid mobile, subscribers transferring the mobile number with some balance amount, no credit transfer would be allowed to the new account. “Subscriber has to either consume the balance amount or forgo it. There will be ‘break before make’ arrangement for completion of porting process — that is connection from donor network to be disconnected first and then connection with recipient network will be made. However, efforts should be made so that break period should not be for more than two hours,” TRAI said in a statement.

TRAI has also forwarded to the Department of Telecom (DoT), the draft Request for Proposal (RFP) for selection of an operator which would be licensed for providing and operating end-to-end mobile number portability (MNP) solution in the country.

“For MNP implementation in India, the neutral third party should own and operate MNP Clearing house and logically centralised data base. The company will not have substantial equity (over 10 per cent stake) directly or indirectly in any of the telecom service provider in India. Similarly, any telecom service provider will not have substantial equity, directly or indirectly in the company,” the regulator said.

TRAI said that planning of database needed to be done on all India basis with scalability option, so it is implemented in metro service areas, in the first phase. The foreign direct investment cap for this neutral third party would be pegged at 74 per cent. “Respective Access or long distance operators will bear the cost of up-gradation of their networks, TRAI added.

TRAI said that the cost for setting up and running of the MCHA would be borne by the MNP licensee who shall recover it in the form of port transaction fee from service providers.

It may be recalled that following the acceptance of TRAI recommendations on Mobile Number Portability, DoT had asked the regulator to constitute a Steering Committee to deliberate the issues relating to the its implementation.

Accordingly, TRAI had constituted the committee consisting of representatives from DoT, TEC, all service providers and associations under the chairmanship of Secretary TRAI, for deliberating on the issues relating to methodology for the selection of the neutral third party to act as Mobile Number Portability Clearing House Administrator, creation of data base, interfaces, performance parameters amongst others. The Steering Committee, has now submitted its interim report on some of these key issues including draft RFP for selection of an operator.

More Stories on : Telecommunications | Regulatory Bodies & Rulings

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page