While every Indian telecom operator, at the moment, is concentrating on delivering data-centric offers to its customers, consumers seem to be in a confusing mode as most of them are looking to port out of one operator to another who is offering better benefits. One has to admit that Reliance Jio has the best tariff plans right now, but state-run telecom operator BSNL is not far behind.
As a result, telecom regulator TRAI is receiving whopping MNP requests every month. And the month of July 2017 receives no different as the telecom regulator a whopping 5.91 million MNP requests in the said month.
According to the data released by Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on September 13, 2017, the regulator has received a total of 5.91 million MNP (Mobile Number Portability) requests only in the month of July 2017. This number is up from 5.88 million requests received in June 2017.
Until July 31, 2017, the cumulative MNP requests increased from 288.97 million at the end of June 2017 to 294.87 million, since the implementation of MNP. TRAI has divided the MNP service into two zones in India- Zone-I and Zone-II. In Zone-I, regions under Northern and Western India will be covered, and this zone received the highest number of MNP requests compared to Zone-II.
The cumulative MNP requests for Zone-I stand at 148,818,706, while the Zone-II is marginally less at 146,052,924 MNP requests. In MNP Zone-I, the highest number of requests till date have been received in Rajasthan of about 24.85 million, followed by Gujarat receiving about 21.02 million.
In MNP Zone-II, the maximum number of requests till date have been received in Karnataka about 32.03 million, which is followed by Andhra Pradesh receiving 26.65 million requests.
In Zone-I, the lowest number of requests is received by Jammu & Kashmir at 1,79,441, followed by Himachal Pradesh with just 1,09,8277 requests receiving till date.
As usual, TRAI did not release the data regarding which operator received the maximum number of MNP requests. By far, it would be Reliance Jio and BSNL due to the luring data offers. Bharti Airtel also announced some attractive offers in July 2017.
Speaking about the MNP service, it was initially started back in 2010 in Haryana and quickly spread across every state of India at the beginning of 2011. Back then, the service was available as Intra-service portability. In 2015, TRAI started the service on an Interstate portability, which means that subscribers can keep their existing number when relocating from one area to another.