1 In 4 Mobile Subscribers Who Ported Their Number In Last 24 Months Struggled With Process: Survey

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New Delhi: In India, one out of every four mobile connection users who ported their number to a different service provider in the previous 24 months encountered difficulties. According to a survey conducted by Local Circles, only 47 percent of consumers thought the porting procedure was simple.

The survey result states that 11 percent of participants found the process to be "very difficult" and 14 percent found it to be "quite difficult." A little over 23 percent said it "wasn't difficult but wasn't easy either", 29 percent said it was "quite easy", and 18 percent said porting was "very easy". ()

More than 23,000 comments were submitted for the report from people living in 311 different districts of India. 32 percent and 44 percent, respectively, of responses were from tiers 2 and 1, respectively.

The percentage of respondents from tier 3, tier 4, and rural regions was around 24 percent. According to the survey, when customers tried to port their mobile service number to a new operator, their initial mobile service provider either caused bottlenecks or processed requests slowly.

"This shows that there are process improvements that are urgently needed. To make mobile number portability (MNP) more subscriber-friendly, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) must collaborate with the operators, the research stated.

This week, TRAI requested stakeholder feedback by October 25 on the Draft Telecommunication Mobile Number Portability (Ninth Amendment) Regulations, which proposed modifications to the MNP rules to add measures against fraud.

"According to the new amendment, the porting operator (the network to whom the customer is porting) must match the demographic information provided by the donor operator with the client's submission. Unless the operators successfully expedite the submission and matching process, this is likely to make matters worse for customers, the survey said.