11-02-2012, 03:48 PM
Mobile Number Portability: Riding the wave
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Technical Abstract
Lock in of mobile number series with Telecom Service Providers has always been an
impediment to ushering in healthy competition between the mobile carriers. While
India has seen a rapid growth in the penetration of Telephony services, the same
exponential growth is seen lacking when it comes to quality of service offered or
openness of transaction with the large players. Though the initial enrolment of
subscribers to specific carriers has an atmosphere of enthusiasm and a promise of
quality around it, subsequently there is marked degradation in quality of service.
Customers are discouraged to switch service providers as that would involve
changing numbers and possibility of lost calls for the end user.
Mobile Number Portability (MNP) is a technology that enables subscribers to switch
their service providers while retaining their mobile numbers. Deceptively trivial in
terms of nomenclature, the underlying technology that realizes this is quite complex
and neatly integrated into the telephony infrastructure. We attempt to demystify
some of those.
Number Portability technical aspect
Number Portability has to ensure that call routing for all mobile sessions Voice, SMS,
MMS should be enabled with routing to the ported network for the same called
subscriber number. IETF defines three types of number portability (NP): Service
provider number portability (SPNP), location portability and service portability.
The current paper focuses on the SPNP, which is the agenda set by TRAI to the
service provider bodies in India. SPNP allows subscribers to switch service providers
while retaining the same phone number. The technology challenges towards
implementation come through complexities in number administration, network
signalling functions, call routing, billing and service management.
A translation element is necessitated in the network as the mobile number
addressing scheme becomes a virtual address. Central to the address translation
scheme is the NP translation database hereafter to be termed as NPDB (Number
Portability Database).The network classification is done as follows:
Donor Network: The network that first assigns a telephone number to a
subscriber from one of its administered ranges
New Serving Network: The network of the current service provider serving the
ported number.
Old Serving Network: The network prior to porting in of the number to the
current network. It is not necessarily the Donor network as multiple provider
switches is feasible.
