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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

May - 2011 - issue > Technology

Take Your Number with You

Shuba Sridhar
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Shuba Sridhar
Mobile number porting (MNP) is not a new concept. In the West, regulations mandate Mobile service providers to facilitate a seamless move between mobile operators, unless they are under contract. This has triggered price & feature wars among mobile operators making mobile technology & service offerings trendier. Back home, in India, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has regulated mobile operators to rollout these porting facilities, which have so far proven to be quite a success.

There are multiple reasons for switching operators, ranging from changes in individual usage and demand patterns to changing price and quality propositions. The staggered introduction of MNP internationally provides useful natural data that can be used to derive statistics for the Indian market as well. It is seen that lower porting time is typically associated with increased customer switching and lower prices, whereas with less stringent porting time, there is no significant churn or revenue effects.

The benefits from MNP are to both:
* Consumers that actually switch owing to MNP avoid costs of number change
* Consumers that stay with the operator, and get wider benefits owing to intense competition among mobile network providers introduced by MNP.

In summary, there is considerable benefit to all consumers, provided the whole process is well publicized and made simple such that it is easy to adopt.


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