Telecom: Number Portability: Does India need it now?

Here are some of my views on Number Portability, based on my experiences of the many years I spent delivering IT solutions to Telecom Service Providers around the world. One of the much talked about effects of the 1996 Telecom Deregulation Act in the US, was the creation of CLECs (Competitive Local Exchange Carriers) and ILECs (Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers). Forecast to be as far reaching as the breakup of AT&T into Baby Bells that created the earlier Telecom Revolution in the US, it created a flurry of activity amongst Telecom Service Providers and Telecom Solution Providers alike.
Local Number Portability (LNP) introduced various business process engineering projects and formalized the process of handling customer requests through Preorder, PostOrder, Billing and Maintenance processes. We, at a American MNC that I worked for at that time, earnestly went to work putting together a LNP solution. My team was responsible for putting together a solution around a Business Process Engineering platform that could help manage complex Interconnect OSS Business Processes. We started work on this and spoke to several CLECs and ILECs in the US and put together a solution that we thought would also be adopted all over the world. After about 2 years (by end of 1998), the project was abandoned since no carriers were implementing any solutions and the LNP mandate was postponed several times, to be finally implemented by carriers in a basic form @ 2004. In the process, carriers and solution providers in the US and around the OECD countries, spent upwards of $10B, without much success in driving the intent of LNP. There were several delays in implementation, fierce resistance and shoddy implementation. In the mobile world, MNP was finally (rudimentarily) rolled out in the US @ 2005, 9 years after it was first mandated.

Is Number Portability really required now?
TRAI in India, has already had a few false starts in mandating Number Portability in India. After initial discussions in 2001 it was decided to (rightly) wait a few years before mandating LNP in India after telecom penetration has gone past 20%. Here's whats been observed in LNP implementations around the world.

• LNP implementations worldwide have shown prolonged delays in execution, plenty of money spent without real benefits to end customers. Hog wash implementations, through simple "call forwarding" from incumbent networks to the new networks, customer switches have been taking close to a month, as compared to the mandated 24 hours.
• In places such as Hongkong, Norway, UK which implemented LNP, it was found that subscribers switch service providers in the first 6 months after LNP is introduced and stop! Most of these have been Pre-Paid customers who would have switched in any case, with or without MNP.
• Most "decent" national footprint telecom service providers, provide similar levels of service, with customers experiencing similar problems with their new carriers after the honeymoon period is over. Great deal of churn is all that has resulted due to unfair practices by carriers to "buy" customers by helping them switch in to them.
• Most Subscriber Private Phones, these days, remain just that, "private". Most are not even listed. Likely callers to a number are informed of the number on a "need to know basis". Informing a list of 50+ colleagues and acquaintances of a change in number is not very difficult and wont happen too often.
• Most Business Numbers - are tied to a larger nationwide carrier. Free choice from amongst multiple carriers, already ensures that the corporation that's getting a set of numbers selects their carrier based on levels of service and range of services carefully surveyed before connecting up.

Power of the Contact Book
Most mobile phones (and increasingly land line phones as well) have contact lists and subscribers rely heavily on them, often not "remembering" any of the numbers that they have stored away. Once a number is stored away, it can easily be updated with a changed number when the subscriber changing his/her number informs the Closed User Group (CUG)! of "need to know" people. In fact, the Contact Book has virtually created a social revolution in the way homo sapiens manage (and forget) phone numbers.

Google Search and Online Directories
Easily accessible information on the Internet, can help look up any changed numbers if its so required. Companies who change numbers (once in maybe 10 years) could even use it as an opportunity to do some PR and increase contact with their customers! Solutions such as Plaxo, with its centralized contact books can help disseminate changes to CUGs through a few keystrokes.

Future Technologies - Name Lookup a la Internet
I am sure LDAP and DNS like services as on the Internet will soon be available to lookup phone numbers and other "public" information about subscribers on the fly. This will soon make a number and its "need for permanency" meaningless!

Based on past global experiences, current social changes and future technologies, TRAI in India, would be better advised to spend its energies on better concepts that truly keep service levels high and protect customers. Enforcing service providers to maintain mandatory Service Level Commitments, RTI (Right To Information) on Service Order Processing and increasing competition in other ways may be the more productive and efficient way of protecting the consumer!