1 in 4 Indians struggled to port their mobile number in last 24 months: Report

One out of four mobile connection subscribers in India who ported their number to a different mobile service provider in the last 24 months, struggled with the process. Only 47 per cent consumers rated the porting process as easy, a new report revealed on Friday.

According to the online community platform LocalCircles, 11 per cent of consumers said the process was "very difficult", and 14 per cent said it was "quite difficult". About 23 per cent said it "wasn’t difficult but wasn’t easy either", 29 per cent mentioned it was "quite easy", and 18 per cent said porting was "very easy".

The report received more than 23,000 responses from citizens residing across 311 districts of India.

About 44 per cent of respondents were from tier 1 cities, 32 per cent were from tier 2 cities, and 24 per cent of respondents were from tier 3, 4 cities and rural districts.

Interestingly, the report mentioned that the consumers' original mobile service operator created bottlenecks or was slow in processing when they tried to port their number to a new operator.

"This indicates that there are improvements that are urgently needed on the process front. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) needs to work with the operators to make mobile number portability (MNP) more subscriber-friendly," the report said.

Earlier this week TRAI suggested changes to the MNP rules to include safeguards against fraud and has sought stakeholder comments on the Draft Telecommunication Mobile Number Portability (Ninth Amendment) Regulations, by October 25.