At an open house discussion held by TRAI, mobile operators like Jio, Airtel and Vodafone objected to refunding the unspent balance to outgoing users. In the open house discussion, which MediaNama attended, Vodafone said that average prepaid balances of consumers porting to other operators was very low. Other operators used this logic to object to the suggestion that unspent balance should be refunded to users. Jio said that the cost to transfer account balance would be very high while the amount itself would be low. Two TRAI officials, including chairman RS Sharma, called that logic into question. Sharma said that "these five-ten rupees" that operators got from consumers was a primary source of revenue for them. A telco responded, "Sir, we're in losses. The industry is in losses." India has only two companies that are authorized to process mobile porting requests, and they have a ten-year contract. Those companies, Syniverse and Telcordia, sent a sizeable delegation to the discussion. For every port, those companies are paid ₹4 — Syniverse said multiple times in the discussion that this tariff was 'unsustainable' and would have to be increased. Read: TRAI proposes changes to network porting process; emphasis on third-party facilitators Issues and responses — Generating UPC by MNP provider: The Unique Porting Code, which serves as subscribers' one-time password to port to a different operator, is currently generated by the operator who the subscriber is originally with (the 'donor operator'). TRAI has proposed to move that responsibility to the MNP service provider — in India's…
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