State of Mobile Number Portability in Pakistan

Pakistan is first South Asian country to launch Mobile Number Portability. It was successfully launched and PTA has regularized it well, but some discrepancies become declining factors of MNP in the Pakistan.
Some are as follow:

• Call Connectivity: MNP is somewhat like Ufone’s new ad where patient is having every disease. The common complaints communicated by customers are of call connectivity tones, anonymous recipient connectivity and list goes on….
• Donator Operator Reluctantness: Donator is the entity, who is responsible for donating the number to recipient operator. The donator operator is always unwilling to donate customer relationship to recipient operator, where it depends on the revenue of that customer, if customer is having high revenue streams, donor operator will think twice to donate revenue stream to recipient operator; for that operators have different departments like Customer Retention & loyalty or Customer Relationship departments. By these departments, they offer customer certain giveaways to keep customer stick with the same network code.

• Process Delay: This is normal in the process of MNP that it is delayed for no reason or just for the reason for retaining customer on the same network. The process delay is always been a tactic of Donator operator to create different hinders in donating customer to other network, some of the common process delay messages are :
  A.    System Down Problem
  B.    We haven’t received any response from Recipient Operator
  C.    Any other bureaucratic style errors.

Whatever the case would be, cellular mobile operators must help customers who want to port to other operators and PTA must take notice of any complains regarding the issue. At the same time it is also responsibility of customer to complain strongly to PTA if he/she come across any problem.

For those who think that this is the time to switch to another network; find below the procedure for getting benefited of Mobile Number Portability.

1. Certain requirements need to be met before MNP can be requested for a phone account; such as: proof of ownership, no conflict due to existing agreement, number should have been in service for at least 60 days etc.
2. Fill out a form and present it to the provider to which you wish to port – called Recipient Network.
3. Pay the porting fee (varies by company, up to a few hundred rupees).
4. A Number Portability Request (NPR) is launched by the Recipient Network and you are given a SIM and a tentative time (at least 4 days – but could be up to 21 days) to when you can start to use new mobile provider network on this SIM.

Those who want more ins and outs of this process may find this document quite helpful to them.