The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India- TRAI has issued a directive to all mobile operators asking donor operators to not reject MNP porting requests on the ground that they received a cancellation request from a subscriber through SMS, voice calls and in written form. The authority said that it had observed a high percentage of porting request cancellations from donor operators. However, a customer can still withdraw the porting request within 24 hours of requesting for it only to the recipient operator. To exemplify, this means that if a Vodafone customer makes a porting request, Vodafone(donor operator) can not reject it even if the subscriber asks Vodafone to do so via an SMS, voice call or written request. The request can only be cancelled if the same subscriber first goes to another operator, for instance, Airtel (recipient operator), with the porting request, and cancels it within 24 hours. The TRAI directive indicates that operators might be persuading subscribers making porting requests to withdraw them, which could also involve incentivizing them in some way, following which they are canceling porting requests by themselves, which is against the TRAI MNP guidelines. The TRAI clarifies that porting requests should only be cancelled by donor operators if: - There are outstanding payments due from the subscriber in form of pending bill or bills issued as per the normal billing cycle but before the date of application for porting - The porting request has been made before the expiry of a period of ninety days from the date of activation…
