Good News for customers who want to Port their SIM to new company

NP NEWS 24 ONLINE – On Thursday, Telecom regulator Trai modified mobile number portability (MNP) rules, making the entire process quicker and easier. In the new rule two days timeline for port out requests will be kept in a single circle. Similarly, timeline of four working days has been prescribed for requests for port out from one circle to other.

“To make the porting process faster and convenient, for all cases except corporate porting cases, in the revised process for validation of conditions and generation and delivery of unique porting code (UPC), it has been provisioned to establish a query response mechanism to enable the mobile number portability service provider to query the database of the donor operator on real time basis,” Trai said in the new Telecom Mobile Number Portability (Seventh Amendment) Regulations, 2018.

It also made some strict rule like “wrongful rejection” of the porting request will be penalized up to Rs 10,000.

“Porting timeline of 2 working days has been provisioned for the requests of Intra-Licensed Service Area (Intra-LSA) numbers except the requests made under corporate category and the timelines of 4 working days has been provisioned for all the porting requests of Inter-Licensed Service Area (Inter-LSA) numbers and corporate category,” Trai said.

Besides this, other major changes have been incorporated such as the validity of the Unique Porting Code or UPC has been brought down to four days instead of a fortnight agreed earlier, for all circles except Jammu & Kashmir, Assam and North East, where the validity of the said code remains unchanged,” Trai added.

“Process for withdrawal of porting requests has been made simpler and quicker through SMS (text message). For the cases of corporate porting, present limit of 50 numbers in single authorisation letter has been enhanced to 100 numbers per authorisation letter. Provisions for the financial disincentives have been broadened upon contravention of the provisions of MNP Regulations,” the regulator said.

The industry will take six months to implement the changes after which the new regulation will come into force. Moreover, to tackle instances of technical errors, Trai will issue appropriate quality of service norms as well. Trai had floated a consultation paper on the issue in April and announced draft norms in September.