The prophecy of the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) that MNP woudn't be a "game changer" is holding true for the moment, with small number of Mobile Number Portability (MNP) requests being made in India, relative to the active subscriber base of around 573 million. But the numbers are increasing, month on month: March 2011 saw a 67.56% increase in requests for MNP in India, compared to the previous month: about 6.42 million subscribers have submitted requests for changing their telecom service provider by the end of March 2011; India had around 579.39 million active connections at the same time. Out of these requests around 4.33 lakh pertains to Haryana wherein MNP was first piloted on 25th November 2010. Some trends from the data released by the India's Telecom regulator TRAI: - Delhi tops among the metropolitan cities with 77.88% growth rate in MNP with 308,515 total porting requests. - Both the zones - Zone 1 for Northern & Western India and Zone 2 for Southern & Eastern India, have shown an increase in MNP requests by over 65%, albeit on a small base. - Zone 1 saw 1,426,449 in total, while Zone 2 saw 1,163,112 in all. - In Zone-I, the maximum number of requests have been received in Gujarat (6.17 lakh), followed by Rajasthan (5.49 lakh) than that of 3.13 lakh and 3.64 lakh respectively in February. Uttar Pradesh (East) tops the zone with a growth rate of 78.47%. - In Zone-II maximum number of requests have been received…
