The right number

Number portability is the next big thing. TRAI has begun the movement towards this convenience. In a nutshell, it means that customers would be able to switch from one mobile telephony vendor to another, while retaining their original numbers. To telecom vendors the implementation of number portability sounds like needless hard work. It would mean that every phone call will have to be analysed through a database, to understand which vendor it should be routed to. But, actually, TRAI is bang on track.

Number portability increases competition. When a person realises that Vendor A offers lower prices to Vendor B, he is normally disinclined to switch given the inconvenience of communicating a new number to all his contacts. But with number portability, this disincentive would vanish and a stumbling block that is at present inhibiting competition would be removed. Maximising competition is the need of the moment. For instance, when the DOT monopoly was broken, Indian telecom was revolutionised. The number of telephones went up from 25 million in 8217;99 to nearly 150 million today. Telephony went from being a luxury to becoming a necessity. With greater competition will come lower prices, which will fuel further growth in the sector.

There is a great deal more that TRAI can do on the competition front. First, the timeframe of one year envisaged for rollout is far too relaxed. This needs to be revised to less than six months. Further, portability is proposed to apply only within a circle. The best thing, from India8217;s point of view, is portability across the country: when a person migrates within the country, his phone number should not be affected. The next frontier to cross is fixed line phones. It is now time to unify all fixed line and all mobile telephones into a single 10-digit numbering system that covers the whole country. After that, it will be possible to have number portability across all phones. Finally, a long-standing problem is the lack of unbundling of long distance telephony: a customer should be able to prefix a long-distance code by an operator identification code, and thus access any long distance vendor. TRAI needs to hit that dial pad faster.