Mobile number portability dials a free for all

“It is the open season now.”

The comment by India’s telecom secretary R Chandrasekhar, as prime minister Manmohan Singh unveiled the long-awaited nationwide number portability regime in the capital on Thursday, echoes the sentiment of many of India’s 700 million mobile phone subscribers.

“They (the operators) knew that a person who is their customer could not leave them without losing their number. Now, both existing and new subscribers are fair game,” Chandrasekhar said.

Indeed, the initial trends seem to re-emphasise the issue of competition. Some new operators, eager to lure customers away from incumbents, have already announced novel schemes.

For example, Mumbai-based Loop Mobile said it will reimburse the cost of any call that is dropped due to congestion on its network — so that customers don’t leave for what’s probably the most likely reason for churn among subscribers.

Similarly, Russia’s Sistema, which runs the CDMA-based MTS brand, has tied up with many banks to offer a unique EMI facility to new customers.

Incumbents, however, did not betray any signs of worry. “High value customers are extremely wary of changing to the new lot of service providers that have limited or untested network coverage and quality,” said Samaresh Parida, director of strategy at Vodafone Essar.

“It looks like people who were the keenest on number portability are also the ones who are losing the most,” said a senior Airtel official.

Portability was pushed through by the ‘class of 2008’ — the six to seven new operators who entered the scene in February 2008 — in the hope that consumers tired of congested networks and dropped calls would switch over to their unburdened ones.    

That, however, is not how it has panned out, according to the Cellular Operators’ Association of India (COAI) which has traditionally stood for the incumbent operators such as Airtel, Vodafone and Idea.

While all-India data is yet to trickle in, COAI says numbers from Haryana, which saw MNP kicked off in November, shows that the wind is blowing in the direction of the incumbents.

“Around 1.5 lakh, or 1% of the total subscribers of Haryana have opted to change their numbers till middle of this month,” says Rajan Mathews, director general of COAI. “While all networks have seen subscribers leave, Vodafone and Bharti have been net gainers as more people have move to them than have left,” he said, adding that Vodafone has emerged as the biggest gainer followed by Bharti. Idea, he said, was neither a gainer nor a loser.

Indeed, others too repeated the numbers, adding that the biggest ‘outflow’ has been seen from CDMA subscribers — those belonging to Reliance Communications and Tata Teleservices.

“It has been seen out of the first set of requests that have come, 70% are CDMA users who wish to change to GSM,” claimed a statement from the Mumbai-based Loop Mobile, one of the new entrants of 2008.

However, not everyone agrees with either the numbers or the interpretation.

“Haryana is not a true representative state to glean out initial trends,” says Rajat Mukarji, chief corporate affairs officer at Idea Cellular.

“We do not believe the trends are representative. It’s too small a market and not one on top of every operators’ mind,” he said, adding that he was not certain if the initial reported numbers are correct or not.

—With inputs from Lison Joseph in Mumbai