8.97 cr number portability requests pending, but do telecoms care?

The level of dissatisfaction of consumers with their existing mobile operators has surely reached astronomical proportions and grows further. Why else would almost 1.05 crore customers request for number portability in Karnataka alone till February this year and another two lakh get added in March? So as of March 2013, 1.07 crore mobile subscribers want to port out of their existing service provider in Karnataka alone.

According to data released by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), almost 8.97 crore people want to port out from their existing service provider all across the country and this staggering number of porting requests were received till March this year. In the month of March alone, 27 lakh new porting requests piled up; in February over January this number was 25.7 lakh mobile phone subscribers. Porting out means retaining the mobile number but opting for a different service provider.

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TRAI issued new MNP regulations in September 2012 under which penalties could be imposed upon operators for unjustified rejection of requests. But no penalties have been imposed on any telecom operator so far.

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So why are such a staggering number of porting requests pending?

As per the TRAI data, almost 33.3 lakh requests for porting are pending in Mumbai alone, while in Delhi this number stands at 29.64 lakh. For Kolkata, it is a little over 20 lakh. The second highest number of porting requests are pending in Rajasthan (after Karnataka) at almost 85.5 lakh till March this year.

At present, porting is restricted to a telecom zone - a Delhi Airtel customer can port to Vodafone but within Delhi. The government intends to make the service national such that the Delhi Airtel customer can take a Vodafone Mumbai connection without changing his number. This move is already being resisted by operators, who say national Mobile Number Portability (MNP) may not be commercially viable as high implementation costs will outweigh demand and add to the cost pressure even as hyper-competition and mounting debt negatively impacts profits in the sector.

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And as porting requests pile up, mobile subscriber base continues to shrink. Almost a million subscribers were lost within a month in February when the total, all India wireless subscriber base fell from 862.62 million to 861.66 million though in percentage terms the decline was a mere 0.11%. But in March, there was a moderate addition to this number to 867.80 million, monthly growth of 0.71%.

So the decline in wireless subscribers, which began in July last year, has gradually lessened and turned marginally positive in March. The decline was primarily due to disconnection of inactive mobile subscribers by telecom operators since the middle of 2012.

The TRAI data showed Bharti Airtel continued its market leadership with a 21.69% market share or every fifth Indian mobile user is on the Bharti network. Vodafone India with 17.56% and Idea Cellular at 14.1% meant these two companies together account for a little less than a third of the mobile users.

Reliance Communications was neck and neck with Idea at 14.17%, while state-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) held 11.66% market share till March 2013. Reliance Communications added the maximum number of new subscribers in March at 30.27 lakh. Voda, Idea and Bharti followed at 24.66 lakh, 23.17 lakh, and 15.74 lakh respectively.

Sistema Shyam Teleservices was the biggest loser in terms of subscribers at almost 21.22 lakh since it has had to shut down operations in 10 circles after being unable to bag licenses and reduce its overall footprint significantly.

Videocon, Uninor, MTNL, Tata Teleservices and Aircel - all lost subscribers as they consolidated operations and gave up some circles where they were unable to win back licenses in the two auctions till now.