Back in the day¡¯s people mostly used wire lines to communicate. It was noticed that customers never liked if they had to change there telephone numbers if they move from one place to other.The wireless industry was just picking up then.Number Portability came making it possible for subscribers to move from one place to other, one service provider to other and oneservice to other without changing their telephone/mobilenumbers. Number portability (NP) was designed for wire-line industry keeping the wire-less industry in view.There was need for additional technology to be in place for NP to operate. A number portability data base was created and all thesubscriber numbers who have ported were stored in it.Since multiple operators are involved it was decided to bring in place a neutral vendor to manage and maintain this data base.In case of India it is Telecordia. The whole country was divided into zone and each zone had a NP data base. As in case of India its Zone2.All the service providers in the zone are required to have a connection to NP database so as to find out the call routing information for a subscriber. This service is some thing similar to call-forwarding except that subscribers will not have to pay for the forwarding service. Subscriber in one zone can be easily ported from one service provider to other if NP database is updated.In our case, that is India, Telecordia is the neutral vendor.
Zone 2 consists of following circles.
6¦1 Kolkata
6¦1 Tamil Nadu including Chennai
6¦1 Andhra Pradesh
6¦1 Karnataka
6¦1 Kerala
6¦1 Madhya Pradesh
6¦1 West Bengal
6¦1 Assam
6¦1 Bihar
6¦1 North East
6¦1 Orissa
Usually porting the number fromone service provider to other should not take much time but a maximum of 2 days is assumed to be ok. Charges for NP should be bare minimum. In few countries NP is free!
What this means to subscribers: ¨C Freedom from changing their contact numbers if relocated, Freedom from service providers clutches, Easy access to various plans in other service providers.What this means to service providers: ¨C
More competition. Network overhead for call routing and numerous initial complaints!
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