Telecom Authority seeks views on per port transaction fee

The regulator has sought written comments on the paper to be filed by March 15.
For representational purposes.
For representational purposes.

NEW DELHI: The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Friday issued a consultation paper to review ‘per port transaction charge’ and other related charges for mobile number portability (MNP). These are the charges the recipient telecom company pays MNP service provider (MNPSP), when a customer chooses to port from one telecom operator to another. 

EXPRESS ILLUSTRATION
EXPRESS ILLUSTRATION

The consultation papers — seeking stakeholders’ views on whether the per port transaction charge, currently pegged at up to Rs 4, should continue to be computed as per the existing methodology or be moved to a new methodology — comes a year after it slashed the charges that remained at Rs19 since 2009. 

“Now, mergers of some of the major TSPs and closure of services by many TSPs have been witnessed during the last one year. The financial and non-financial information for 2017-18 is now available. Porting data for the last one year shows that the number of port requests per month is declining,” TRAI said. While TSPs have been asking for lower port charges, the two MNPSPs have been complaining about falling revenue.

The TRAI paper also asks whether the total number of MNP requests received by MNPSPs or the successfully ported numbers should be considered while calculating the ‘per port transaction charge’. It also seeks whether the charges for ‘per port transaction’ and ‘ancillary services’ should be determined separately or on a consolidated basis. Views were also on whether or not ‘porting charge’ payable by the telecom subscriber to the recipient telecom company should continue to be prescribed as a ceiling rate, as is the practice now.

The regulator has sought written comments on the paper to be filed by March 15. Timeline for counter-comments has been set as March 22. Separately, TRAI on Friday said it has been informed by players that almost all cable TV consumers have either made their channel preferences or been moved to ‘best-fit plan’ under the new regime.“As per inputs provided by DPOs, nearly 100 per cent consumers of cable TV homes have been migrated to the new framework either based on options of subscribers or as per ‘best-fit plan’,” TRAI secretary S K Gupta told PTI.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Friday held a meeting with distribution platform owners, including multi-system operators and all major DTH players, to review the progress of migration of television viewers under the new framework. The DTH service providers have apprised TRAI that all subscribers of this prepaid platform will be migrated to new framework in the next  two-to-three weeks.

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