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  • May 12th, 2005
  • Comments Off on What is Mobile Number Portability (MNP) and how it is implemented?
The constitution of the Mobile Number Portability (MNP) supervisory board and election of its Chairman is a landmark in the history of development of cellular mobile phone industry in Pakistan. Under the chairmanship of Mr Tore, the Board would work professionally and reach to an acceptable solution. It would help the implementation of MNP according to the schedule. Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) would facilitate the Board in its pursuit to make it convenient to implement the MNP in the given period; this was said by Chairman PTA, Major General (Retd) Shahzada Alam Malik, while addressing the participants of the second MNP meeting.

"Mobile Number Portability or MNP" is an ability to retain an existing mobile Subscriber number along with Operator code while shifting connectivity from one Operator to another Operator; in general it is a circuit-switch network service provided by the Cellular or Fixed Line Operators to the consumers with the ability to change service providers, locations, or service types without changing their telephone numbers.

Pakistan Telecommunications (Re-organisation) Act, 1996 provides that the PTA "shall promote and protect the interests of users of telecommunication services in Pakistan; promote the availability of a wide range of high quality, efficient, cost effective and competitive telecommunication services throughout Pakistan; (and) promote rapid modernisation of telecommunication systems and telecommunication services." These provisions mandate the competition in all aspects of the telecommunications industry.

To realise this long awaited consumer commitment the federal government declared the first ever Mobile Cellular Policy (January 28, 2004) of Pakistan, which provided that "A major drawback to switching mobile operators is that, at present, customers need to change their mobile telephone numbers. In order to establish market conditions that provide maximum choice, consumers should be able to switch operators in order to take advantage of attractive service offerings, lower prices or improved quality...................... To provide flexibility to consumers, all mobile licensees shall implement number portability, according to the PTA's requirements and guidelines."

There have been around than 30 implementations of MNP around the world, and at least 20 more are on the agenda within the next couple of years. PTA sees MNP as an effective and necessary way to maximise competition and consumer choice of telecom services. It has taken a minimalist approach to directly regulate the MNP and has encouraged operators to agree on as many issues as possible regarding the practical implementation of it. PTA recently initiated consultation on cellular number portability and devising regulations for it, deferring a decision on geographic portability and services portability implementation apart from fixed-line (Fixed-line Local Loop and Wireless Local Loop Telecom Services) number portability. Apart from other aspects emerging from the Policy etc this may also be because at the moment it is only in the license of CMTO's that they "shall implement Mobile Number Portability within 2 years from the Effective Date according to the regulations / guidelines issued by the Authority from time to time. The Authority shall prepare the Regulations in consultation with Cellular Mobile Operators."

All the six cellular mobile operators have formed a Supervisory Board or a Numbering Council chaired by the Telenor CEO Mr Tore Johnsen and a representative from PTA to implement Mobile Number Portability (MNP) by 2006 with the help of PTA, which is an independent legal entity where all CMTOs shall collectively own, fund and supervise the centralised database operation to be known as the Central Database Administration (CDBA), Which bears the full financial accountability for the creation and ongoing operation of the CDBA and ensure that good governance prevails, and which undertakes full responsibility for the overall governance and financing of the CDBA on behalf of all Operators and Subscribers.

Implementing MNP is a simple affair. A number of issues have to be considered, such as: Technical solutions for number queries and call routing ; Processes regarding the porting itself; Regulatory aspects concerning protection of consumer rights Economic aspects concerning implementation costs, running costs, increased interconnection costs and other extra costs for routing calls to ported numbers.

The PTA has instructed the Supervisory Board to determine which number portability method to employ. Several routing methods are being investigated what is essential is that all Operators need to negotiate , develop and maintain a technically viable methodology in terms of network codes for authorisation for access to the database and Subscriber number routing information prior to the implementation time schedule of MNP.

As a technical solution MNP implementation relied on individual routing and distributed databases this was because network technology could not support advanced IN solutions, and centralised databases were costly to execute. Recent implementations have discovered more routing-efficient solutions such as centralised databases to ensure higher efficiency for both porting processes and number queries, the Location Routing Number (LRN) method has also appeared to be the most efficient method for both porting processes and number queries and is successfully implemented.

In the number portability process the administrative procedures and administrative interfaces between Operators are defined at commercially agreed upon terms. The numbers that can be ported include, without exception, all numbers for which a written agreement or reservation exists. The Subscriber shall reactivate the mobile number at the Donor Operator, and then activate the porting, with the Recipient Operator providing this is done within the retention time frame. The Recipient Operator shall inform all other Operators of the mobile number's, at completion time of a porting, the new/actual information for routing, charging, single access code and SPC by ensuring this data is recorded at the CDBA. All Subsequent portability shall be handled in the same manner as the first time. The current Operator shall become the Donor Operator and the new Operator becomes the Recipient Operator. If a Subscriber wants to return to the previous Operator, the order shall be handled like a standard porting order. There shall be no difference even if the Recipient Operator was the original Number Range holder. If, for any reason, the Subscriber wants to end his Subscriber relationship with his current Operator, the current Operator handles this as a termination in his administrative and technical systems and shall reset the status of the number in question to 'not in service' or 'ceased'. At the expiration of the Retention or Quarantine period the Subscriber Number shall revert to the original Range Holder. As mentioned, number portability is the ability of end users to change service providers, locations, or service types without changing their mobile numbers and their preface codes. The PTA does require that MNP should be 'transparent' to consumers - meaning remote callers should automatically be connected to ported subscribers, requiring no procedural or dialling changes to the originating caller. It also supports Central Database for IT porting, ie, the database holding all relevant details regarding all mobile Subscriber number ranges for all CMTOs together with the history of any porting activity for any particular Subscriber number and should be available for port inquiries, recording porting request status, and for providing specific statistical information.

The exchange of telephone data, as well as the maintenance of the integrity and content of the data, between the database administration and Operators participating in MNP could be managed effectively. The MNP order data exchanged between Operators in connection with implementation of MNP also shall only be used to perform the function of MNP. The issues the Operators may consider as they ramp up for full porting implementation include: inter-company testing; telephone directory listings for customers who opt to switch their services from one operator to an other service provider and wish to publish directory information; troubleshooting; interconnection agreements; cost recovery and bill reconciliation, as well as the Inter-carrier Communications pre-porting process.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2005


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