Acting on complaints about Mobile Number Portability being denied for corporate numbers, owing to "contractual obligations", the India Telecom regulator TRAI has allowed mass portability for corporate accounts: Mobile numbers can now be ported for corporate accounts, as long as there is a letter of authorization from the authorised signatory of the corporate mobile numbers. In fact, as many as 50 corporate numbers can be ported out with a single porting request. The guidelines will come into effect 90 days from now, and telecom operators will be allowed 48 hours to port users out, as opposed to 24 hours for individual porting requests. Mobile number portability has been around for quite a while - since January 2011 - and Indian telecom has, till April 2013, received 91 million porting requests. That's an average of around 3.3 million porting requests per month on an average. The number of porting requests has fluctuated quite a bit: Oct 2012: 53.61 Lakhs Nov 2012: 19.86 Lakhs Dec 2012: 29.35 Lakhs Jan 2013: 42.03 Lakhs Feb 2013: 25.66 Lakhs Mar 2013: 28.65 Lakhs There is, of course, the issue that the telecom operators haven't been particularly open to allowing MNP: requests to port out have denied often, so much so that the TRAI decided to set up a fine, if they are in contravention of TRAI's MNP regulations: A fine of Rs 5000 in case they don't port users out within a specified time, and Rs 10,000 in case there is contravention of a request to…
