India's MNP model will be a success: Syniverse

BANGALORE, INDIA: Mobile number portability service providers Syniverse and Telcordia have been in news for all the good and bad reasons.

Also Read: MNP: Poaching with Portability

Sanjay Kasturia, director, India Subcontinent, Syniverse Technologies, talks about the allegations raised upon the company's capability as a mobile number portability (MNP) service provider and the reasons for the delay in MNP implementation in India, in an interview to CIOL. Excerpts:

CIOL: There is an allegation that the two MNP service providers (Syniverse and Telcordia's MNP Interconnection Telecom Solutions India Pvt. Ltd) lack infrastructure for the implementation of MNP. What is your take on it?

Sanjay Kasturia: Syniverse has been providing a wide range of services to mobile operators for more than 20 years, so we are in an excellent position to bring all our core strengths in roaming, interoperability, network services and more to India’s MNP initiative.

We have deep experience with number portability and have played key roles in MNP implementations in a number of countries around the world, including the United Kingdom, Finland, Singapore, the United States and Canada.

The transition in those locations to MNP has been nearly seamless for both the operators and the subscribers, and we expect the same successful process in India as we build an MNP programme that leverages our experience and ongoing commitment to bring the industry’s best number portability experts to the task. 

Not only does Syniverse have an extensive experience providing technical infrastructure behind number portability – the database part of the equation – but also have successfully implemented  additional critical operator-side MNP gateway systems by which individual mobile operators need to ensure that their systems are able to provide subscribers with seamless, end-to-end portability.

CIOL: How are numbers ported across networks?

SK: MNP technology provides the means to move a subscriber's mobile number from the donor network (the subscriber’s current service provider network) to the recipient network (the subscriber’s new service provider network), when the subscriber chooses to change his/her service provider.

This process of moving a number is called “porting”. The number is “ported” to the new network. To complete the port, the subscriber's mobile number and the recipient’s network ID are paired and updated in a master centralized database.

CIOL: What are the challenges in the MNP implementation in India?

SK: The porting model selected in India has an excellent track record of success on a global basis.

India will use a recipient-operator initiated method of porting, which means a subscriber will go to his/her desired new operator to initiate the port, and that new operator will start the porting process to close the account at the subscriber’s soon-to-be former operator.

For call routing, India has selected the all-call query model, which requires each call be checked against a database of ported numbers to determine which network should terminate the call.  

To implement these proven porting and call routing models, mobile service providers need to upgrade their infrastructures to enable appropriate rerouting of calls to subscribers who have ported out of their network.

The operator preparations for these models take time, and the manner of handling such routing and data management is critical, as any inefficiency will directly lead to inefficiency in transmission as well as errors in switching.

In the end, the quality and service enabled by this approach will play an important role in ensuring MNP is beneficial for end users.