The Department of Telecom will ask telecom operators to weed out inactive mobile users in a bid to free up mobile numbers. According to the telecom regulator, there are 840 million mobile subscribers of whom only about 588 million users are active. However, the operators continue to count the inactive users as subscribers, thus blocking the numbers allocated to them.

But the problem is that the current National Numbering Plan 2003 was designed for 750 million connections, including 450 million mobile users, and was expected to last till 2030. This has come under severe strain, with mobile numbers crossing the mark in 2009 itself. “We are going to allocate numbering resources based on the active subscriber base. We may take the opinion of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India before issuing a directive to the operators on this issue,” said a DoT official.

The Government is expecting the number of mobile subscribers to exceed 1 billion by 2014. But under the current numbering schemes there aren't enough numbers to be given out. The DoT had earlier suggested moving the mobile numbering scheme to an 11-digit series but this was shot down by the TRAI on grounds that operators would have to bear huge costs apart from the inconvenience to subscribers. DoT is now looking to deal with the problem partly by asking the operators to take away numbers from inactive users. “There is an urgent need for service providers to determine ‘permanently inactive' customers so as to remove and recycle such numbers. This aspect is very important for efficient utilisation of numbering resources and needs immediate attention,” an internal DoT note said.

>tkt@thehindu.co.in

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