IANS | 01 Oct, 2023
One out of four mobile connection subscribers in India who ported
their number to a different mobile service provider in the last 24
months, struggled with the process. Only 47 per cent consumers rated the
porting process as easy, a new report revealed on Friday.
According
to the online community platform LocalCircles, 11 per cent of consumers
said the process was "very difficult", and 14 per cent said it was
"quite difficult". About 23 per cent said it "wasn’t difficult but
wasn’t easy either", 29 per cent mentioned it was "quite easy", and 18
per cent said porting was "very easy".
The report received more than 23,000 responses from citizens residing across 311 districts of India.
About
44 per cent of respondents were from tier 1 cities, 32 per cent were
from tier 2 cities, and 24 per cent of respondents were from tier 3, 4
cities and rural districts.
Interestingly, 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 has sought stakeholder comments on the Draft
Telecommunication Mobile Number Portability (Ninth Amendment)
Regulations, by October 25.
