Mobile number portability: 3 days to process MNP in same circle, 5 days for inter-circle

New Delhi: Telecom regulator Trai on Tuesday revamped mobile number portability (MNP) rules, making the entire process faster and simpler, and prescribed three working days timeline for port out requests within a service area.

Similarly, timeline of five working days has been prescribed for requests for port 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 3 working days; whereas the porting requests of inter-licence service area nature and all porting requests under corporate category will be completed in 5 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.

While 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 North East, where the validity of the said code remains unchanged to 30 days, it said.