India is set to miss the March 31 deadline for implementing mobile number portability (MNP), the facility that allows customers to retain their cellphone numbers, but change their operator, junior minister for communications and IT Gurudas Kamat told Parliament on Thursday.
This will mark the third instance of the country missing out the deadline to offer its 550-million cellular users this facility. The earlier date for introducing MNP was December-end 2009 in the metros and the category A circles. But, with the department of telecom (DoT) being unable to meet this deadline, it had then announced that this facility would be rolled out simultaneously across the whole country from April 2010.
For consumers, the latest development implies that their wait for MNP is only set to get longer.
Mr Kamat also said the government would soon announce the new deadline for MNP.
“Various activities are required to be carried out by the operators, including technical augmentation and upgradation of their existing networks, carrying out required instillation verification tests, establishing links with MNP operators and conducting inter-operator test. After the service providers are ready with their own inter-operator test results, a complete acceptance test is to be carried out by DoT across all the networks of all the concerned service providers in all the service areas before MNP service is implemented. Since all the networks are not likely to be completely ready by March 31, 2010, this deadline is not likely to be met.
The government is making all efforts to get MNP implemented at the earliest. The revised timeline will be announced by the government after ascertaining the status from all stakeholders and reasonable time required for acceptance testing, so that no network problem in call processing/completion surfaces out after MNP services are launched,” Mr Kamat told the Rajya Sabha in a written reply on Thursday.
Earlier this month, the home ministry has cleared the proposal of Telcordia Technologies to implement MNP service in the country, clearing another roadblock that threatening to delay the implementation of this facility. While US-based Telcordia had earlier obtained the DoT licence to implement MNP in India, the home ministry had raised concerns stating its minority shareholders were only a front, who had no experience in running telecom operations, while also adding that the company had a presence in Pakistan.
