Port your mobile number faster, thanks to new TRAI rules

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India on Tuesday revamped mobile number portability (MNP) rules, making the entire process faster and simpler, and prescribed a timeline of three working days for port-out requests within a service area.

Similarly, timeline of five working days has been prescribed for requests for porting out from one circle to another.

The new rules will come into effect from December 16.

"Individual porting request of intra-licenced service area nature will be completed in three working days; whereas the porting requests of inter-licence service area nature and all porting requests under corporate category will be completed in five working days," TRAI said in a statement.

According to present rules, telecom operators and MNP service providers are required to process the request of subscribers within four days in the same circle to change their telecom operator without changing their mobile number. The stipulated time was four days for transferring mobile number into other telecom circle or on to network of any other operator outside the circle from where a subscriber purchased the connection.

The MNP request under the present rule will be processed till December 9 and the service will not be available between December 10 and December 15 as entities involved in the process will be migrating their systems to implement new rules.

Besides this, other major changes have been incorporated such as the validity of the Unique Porting Code or UPC has been brought down to four days instead of a fortnight prescribed earlier, for all circles except Jammu & Kashmir, Assam and northeast, where the validity of the said code remains unchanged to 30 days, TRAI said.