Trai to mediate number portability disputes

Last week the Department of Telecom (DoT) held a meeting on the revised terms on the Trai's Request for Proposals for MNP in which it is  believed to have agreed to the changes.

In case the service provider and the licensee fail to resolve any issue concerning MNP implementation, they may jointly request Trai to facilitate reconciliation between them, the regulator said in the proposed modifications in the draft Request for proposals for selection of the licensee.

At present, all the disputes between operators, operators and Government, operators and Trai go to TDSAT. In fact, TDSAT was not even mentioned in the original RFP proposal of Trai as the resolving body.

Earlier, the regulator had proposed that in case of any dispute between the service providers and the licensee, they will try to resolve themselves. However, in case of failure to resolve it, they may request Trai to facilitate the reconciliation between them.

The proposed changes would also make it mandatory for all the fixed, NLDOs and ILDOs to maintain their own local number portability data base for routing of each and every call instead of using the Number Portability Data Base.

The regulator is also set to issue a separate set of regulation for the quality of service benchmark for port management systems consisting of the MCHe, NPDB and Query systems.

The regulator wants 99.99 per cent system maintenance below which the performance bank guarantee will be forfeited.