India's Department of Telecommunications has decided to extend the deadline for tenders for a Mobile Number Portability platform by one month. The comprehensive clarifications to bidder's queries shall now be released on the 22nd January.
The tenders were scheduled to be called for on January 6th.
Mobile Number Portability is due to be implemented in the major four cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkatta and Chennai by June 2009, and extended to the rest of the country by the end of the year.
A report early last year by Analysys noted that while MNP has been in place for several years in many countries, despite the high level of churn in the mobile industry there are few examples where more than 10% of mobile numbers have been ported.
Number portability, however, needn't be bad news for everyone in the industry. It is a great opportunity for a service provider to differentiate from the rest of the pack by offering a truly superior service that is customized to individual users -- something that few service providers seem to be doing today. And as Bharti's Chairman Sunil Mittal reportedly said last July, it opens the prospect of attracting high-end users from competitors.
If managed well, the revenue upside from a higher number of high-end customers could even stem the continued fall in average revenues per user each quarter.
Posted to the site on 6th January 2009
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