One out of four mobile connection subscribers in India who ported their number to a different service provider in the last 24 months struggled with the process. Only 47% consumers rated the porting process as easy, a survey by Local Circles has revealed.
According to the survey report, 11% respondents said the process was “very difficult”, and 14% said it was “quite difficult”. Around 23% said it “wasn’t difficult but wasn’t easy either”, 29% mentioned it was “quite easy”, and 18% said porting was “very easy”.
The report received more than 23,000 responses from citizens residing across 311 districts of India. Around 44% respondents were from tier 1 areas and 32% were from tier 2 regions. Around 24% respondents were from tier 3, 4 areas and rural districts.
The report mentioned that the consumers’ original mobile service operator created bottlenecks or was slow in processing when they tried to port their number to a new operator.
“This indicates that there are improvements that are urgently needed on the process front. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) needs to work with the operators to make mobile number portability (MNP) more subscriber-friendly,” the report said.
Earlier this week, TRAI suggested changes to the MNP rules to include safeguards against fraud and sought stakeholder comments on the Draft Telecommunication Mobile Number Portability (Ninth Amendment) Regulations, by October 25.
“The new amendment requires the donor operator to send demographic details of the customer seeking portability with the porting operator (the network which the customer is porting to) required to match them with customer’s submission. This is likely to make things worse for consumers unless the operators effectively streamline the process of submission and matching,” the report said.
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