April 27, 2007	Friday	Rabi-us-Sani 09, 1428

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window).

LAHORE, April 26: Less than one per cent of the cell phone users have opted for the Mobile Number Portability after one month of its launch, raising a question whether it is the ‘right time’ to offer the service to the public.

According to the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, around 10,000 of the 50.2 million cell phone subscribers have availed themselves of the facility in a month and about 20,000 have applied for it. However, some cell phone operators claim that the number of people who has benefitted from the facility is not more than 7,500.

MNP means providing a subscriber of a cellular network operator with an option to change his or her company without changing the existing number.

Some cell phone operators are of the view that the MNP project, which has been introduced at a cost of over Rs5 billion, could not click here considering the people’s priorities. “How would a cell phone subscriber go for MNP by depositing Rs500 as most of the cellular companies are offering less than Rs500 for a new connection,” said a company staffer.

Besides, he said, the people here had tendency to buy new connections instead of changing the company. He said the architect of the project should have considered all these aspects before forcing the companies to implement it.

“Instead of blocking huge amount in the project, the cellular operators should have been asked to spend it on improving their quality of service and expansion of their network.”

He said the MNP was primarily aimed at enhancing fair competition among all the cellular operators and improving quality of the service they were offering, but the project was not yielding results.

He said even India did not hastily introduce the MNP considering the local conditions. Pakistan could not be compared with Hong Kong where 850,000 cell phone users had availed themselves of the MNP facility on the first day of its launch some two years ago, he added.

A PTA spokesman said it was too early to say that it was not right time to launch the MNP project. In principle, the MNP had to be introduced, he said, and hoped that with the passage of time the people would certainly turn to it after getting information about it.