Trai cuts mobile number portability charges by 79% to Rs4

New Delhi: The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on Wednesday slashed the charges for mobile number portability (MNP) by almost 79% to a maximum of Rs4. The prescribed ceiling for MNP rates was Rs19, so far.

Trai’s latest move means that subscribers cannot be charged more than Rs4 for MNP requests but the recipient operators are “free to charge” a lesser amount from them.

Notifying the regulation to this effect, Trai said it has “decided that the per port transaction charge may be reduced as the costs of operations of Mobile Number Portability Service Providers (MNPSPs) have substantially gone down and the volume of MNP traffic has increased”.

Trai had initiated a consultation process to review these charges in mid-December and followed it up with an open house discussion on the issue on 16 January.

The authority has been of the view that considering the upsurge in the volume of porting requests with effect from 3 July 2015, and the financial results of both the mobile number portability service providers (MNPSPs), the ceiling of Rs19 is “quite high” as compared to cost and volumes of transaction involved.