REGULATION: A Prelude to Portability

The ITU vision statement talks about allotting each human being a telephone
number as soon as he is born; a telephone number so unique across the wide
world, that he keeps it throughout his life. Change of places, operators, type
of phone, mobile or fixed are all taken care of and the number continues across
geographies and technologies. Truly state of the art!

We are still decades to go before we can conceive, let alone implement, such
a solution but there are ways that partially address the bottlenecks involved.
Change of place or a change of operator or even a change of technology are some
issues that can be addressed through what is called number portability (NP).

What Is Number Portability?

Technically, telephone number portability is a service that provides
residential and business telephone customers with the ability to retain their
existing telephone numbers when changing service providers, services, or
location.

There are three types of portability

• Service Provider Portability

• Service Portability

• Location Portability

Service provider portability, by far the most commonly
deployed, allows a customer to keep his telephone number when changing local
telephone companies. It does not allow customers to take their telephone numbers
with them when they move. The number can be ported across as a fixed to fixed,
mobile to mobile, or even a fixed to mobile and vice versa.

The other two, more complicated to implement and very rarely
deployed, allow the number to be ported across locations and services. Porting
across services is still a market driven requirement but porting across
locations is what some customers seek. This is not unviable technically, but the
regulatory and interconnect conditions in a network have lot of bearing on this.
As an example to this, consider a Delhi number 011 — 5161 4444 ported to
Mumbai. This would not only require the area code 011 to be converted to area
code 022 which will be violating the fixed line national numbering plan but also
the license condition  limiting the presence of 011 number within Delhi
SDCA. Technically however, it is analogous to any roaming call (a Delhi Cellular
number roaming in Mumbai), difference being the permanent nature of translated
number as against temporary translation for a roaming number.

How It Helps

Regulators typically mandate number portability in order to deregulate the
telecom industry and increase competition. The cost to the customer and ease of
use benefits as he can retain the old number and payments on a change of
operator are minimal. This also ensures high quality of service by all operating
companies lacking which there is an easy migration towards the better player.

How NP Gets Implemented

Each country’s regulator sets its own rules and criteria for operators’
implementation. In the US, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) set the
architecture, constraints, and method of implementation (Location Routing
Number). In the EU, country regulators provide guidelines and specifications for
inter-operator signaling options for implementation. The Operators decide which
option to use.

Implementation of NP in a country depends upon three factors
in a major manner

1. The way the telecom companies are licensed to operate

2. The numbering plan in use

3. Interconnect conditions

From a deployment perspective, this feature is most widely
deployed as local number portability (LNP) in the US. Around 32 million
subscribers were in the ported number database at the end of August 2003.

As compared to the US, the set-up of telecom licences in
India has some differences like mobile operators in India operating over a
significantly larger area with a single rate center. This is what makes a mobile
number make a local call all across the state (called a ‘circle’ in telecom
jargon) whereas a fixed line number can only make a local call within the city
(called a "SDCA" or "Short distance charging area") and
needs to dial a long distance number for intra-city calls.

The other main difference is the numbering plan for mobile
and fixed phones in India, which is totally unlike the US. This comes out of the
above fact that cellular phones operate over a circle whereas fixed phones in
their respective SDCAs.

However, changes are likely when the unified licensing regime
comes into full play. The other salient features of having a different access
and carriage license are similar to the US.

How They Operate

In 1996, US Congress re-examined and changed the Telecommunications Act to
promote competition and reduce regulation in all telecommunications markets.
Before that time, a major barrier to competition was the inability of customers
to switch from one telephone company to another while retaining the same
telephone number. Congress directed local telephone companies to offer
"telephone number portability."

In 1998, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
evaluated the cost involved in Local Number Portability (LNP) and determined
that existing local telephone companies were allowed, but not required, to
recover the costs of implementing and providing telephone number portability
through two kinds of charges:

The first kind were the charges paid by other telephone
companies that use a telephone company’s number portability facilities to
process their own calls like Telco A using the database of Telco B for its own
numbers;

The other kind of payment is a small, fixed monthly charge
assessed on telephone customers or "end users." This is the kind of
regulation that needs to be mandated by TRAI to set the ball rolling in India.
This is again like the roaming charges which cell companies take from their
subscribers.

While the said order placed specific constraints on
operators, a total of 9 in number, to abide by while implementing the number
portability, it did not dictate the modus operandi itself. These constraints
were like continuing support of existing features and facilities, efficient use
of use of numbering plan, independence from databases and facilities of peer
operators and to maintain the standard Quality of Service etc.

The actual implementation was mandated by a later regulation
specifying exactly how the service was to be implemented. This made the use of
so-called location routing number (LRN) compulsory to implement portability.

Future of NP in India

The regulator, TRAI is already working on a consultation paper that will
seek comments from the stakeholders (read all Telcos and interested parties like
consumer organisations etc) about the way NP will be implemented in India. The
issues like whether to have separate portability schemes within the fixed and
within the mobile networks or to encompass both under a single umbrella in line
with the unified access philosophy and their modalities will be discussed.

Looking forward hopefully, Indian subscriber can boast to
have a single identity, which he carries across with him making India one of the
more sophisticated telecom networks. The user will really be a king then.

Shyam Mardikar, head (technical) Bharti Infotel