April 12, 2008	Saturday	Rabi-us-Sani 5, 1429

KARACHI, April 11: The facility of Mobile Number Portability (MNP), launched on March 23 last year, has failed as only 0.25 per cent of the cellphone users have availed it.

In August 2007, only 24,000 mobile phone users had taken this service, while till June 2007, the number was 17,000 users. At that time, total cellphone subscribers in the country were 61 million.

Sources in the telecom sector told Dawn on Friday that approximately 200,000 persons had been using this facility currently out of total cell phone users of 80.3 million in the country.

According to Pakistan Telecom Authority’s figures, till February 2008, Mobilink has 31.36 million subscribers followed by Ufone 17 million, Telenor 16 million, Warid 13.6 million, Paktel 2.1 million and Instaphone 320,238.

The cellular mobile density by February 2008 was 50.76 per cent.

MNP enables mobile telephone users to retain their mobile telephone numbers when changing from one mobile network operator to another.

A customer is required to present an application, a written request on company’s letterhead (for corporate customers), CNIC copy and the actual SIM. It takes approximately four working days to port a number, provided there are no obligations/liabilities on the existing cellular network.

The sources said that the low figures of MNP are due to the users, who might have not been satisfied with the service of the company. If the people are happy with the service and quality of the company then they do not change the service.

Whenever the officials of the PTA and MNP Data Base Guarantee Limited were reached for comments, they tried to shift the responsibility of giving details on each other.

PTA had issued the figures once after the launch on March 23, 2007. Since then no figures were released regarding the gainers and losers of customers under the MNP.

The sources said that every cellphone company had invested $20-30 million each for starting the MNP. The operators also had media campaign after the launch to create awareness among the consumers followed by advertisements issued by the PTA.

They said that both the PTA and cellphone companies had not made an aggressive campaign. It was observed that customers had not shown any excitement about the MNP since its launch.

Cellphone companies are of the view that when people can have a new SIM at Rs100-150 with balance, the MNP had to fail. Many people have multiple SIMs of various operators.The sources said that the MNP was available in 33 countries but it became a success story only in two to three countries.