In an advertisement of the mobile service operator, Idea, a village head (character played by Abhisek Bachchan) gives an Idea to the people of his village, fighting in the name of their castes, not to use the name of their castes in daily life.

He proposes, just to stop the fight among villagers, that everyone should have a number not the name. The idea clicks and fighting stops because everyone has a number in the village.

However, this is an advertisement and not possible till now because people need to change their number for many times when they change the mobile operator service they are using.

Majority of mobile subscribers in India do not change the operator even if they are dissatisfied with the services because they do not want to face the problems the change in number brings to them. Now, the government has announced that mobile number portability would be introduced in four metro cities till the end of 2008.

The provision of number portability would definitely make it easy for subscriber to switch over to other operators. The new provision would create pressure on the mobile service operators to retain customers by reducing call rates and by improving quality of services.

From the last quarter of year 2008, more than 3.75 crore mobile users spread in four metros, Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai, will be able to retain their mobile numbers if they switch to other operator service. The subscribers in four metro cities account for 18.26 per cent of the country’s total subscriber base.

Communications & Information Technology Minister A Raja said that the number portability cannot be introduced across the country in one go. So, the Department of Telecommunications has decided to implement it primarily in the four metros. It will be introduced in four metro cities on a trial basis soon.

Earlier, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) had proposed to implement the number portability in March 2006 and told the government to implement the provision in the metros by April 2007. At that time, all the telecom operators working in India had opposed the system of number portability. They had given the logic that the Indian market had not matured enough to accept the new system.

Now, when the government has decided to implement it first in 4 metros and later in across the country, the mobile operators will have to invest at least Rs 200 crore to implement portability in the four metros and Rs 823 crore on the whole to implement it across the country.

The mobile operators will have to compete with other players in market on quality for the first time. This technology would enable subscribers to change the operator services within GSM services and also between GSM and CDMA by retaining the same number. Now, everyone in India has his own number with him forever...