The real story behind MNP numbers

Recently, the TRAI shot off a notice to cellular operators including Airtel for failing to implement mobile number portability properly. The action against the operators was initiated because the regulator's investigation revealed that number portability was not taking off due to bottlenecks created by the operators thus blocking users from shifting over to rival players. A look at the reported numbers seems to indicate that the TRAI has got it right. A year since the service was first launched, only 23 million porting requests have been reported. Of these, only about 19 million requests have actually been carried out while the remaining 4 million requests have been rejected by the operator on various grounds, some of which are highly questionable. Considering that there were 881 million wireless subscribers as on October 31, the total reported porting request is just fewer than 3 per cent of the total user base. This seems to be far short of the TRAI's own estimates of 10 per cent in the first year. Hence many have already written off MNP.But numbers that are not in the public domain reveal a different story. Data tracked by MNP operators reveal that nearly 60 per cent of the porting requests made by subscribers never get reported, and hence do not reflect in the system. This is because the moment a subscriber sends in a request for the unique porting code, the operator begins taking steps to retain him by offering freebies, extra talk time and reduced call rates. Once the subscriber agrees, the operator does not forward his request to the MNP registry and therefore this does not get reported. So, in reality, there are 34.5 million more consumers than reported, who sent in their request for porting. This means that if the actual number of subscribers who want to change their telecom operator are accounted for, the total porting request will be about 6.5 per cent of the subscriber base, much closer to the TRAI estimate.

While the TRAI should investigate how to reflect the complete picture in reported numbers, this highlights another important point beyond the statistics. Apart from giving the consumers more choice, one of the other key objectives of introducing MNP was to get operators to be more competitive and offer better services to customers. If 60 per cent of subscribers who thought about shifting to another operator ended up changing their decision because their service provider took proactive steps to retain them, then one could say MNP has actually succeeded.