TRAI Suggests 11 Digit Mobile Numbers In India

TRAI has come up with a new recommendation, where the regulator suggested 11 digit mobile numbers as against 10 to increase the user base in the country. The regulator has issued these guidelines under its 'Ensuring Adequate Numbering Resources for Fixed Line and Mobile Services' consultation papers.

"Switching from 10 to 11 digits with the first digit for mobile number as '9' would give a total capacity of 10 billion numbers," Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) said in its new consultation papers. Adding to that, "With the current policy of allotment after 70 percent utilization, this would suffice till India has seven billion connections. This could mean liberal allocation to service providers and administrative ease."

Besides, the telecom regulator states that data-only SIM which used in dongles and some more products are directly shifted to 13-digit numbers instead of 10 digits. For the unaware; the Department of Telecommunication has already recommended 13-digits for M2M connections. Meanwhile, the regulator said the numbers that have been already surrendered by telecom operators might be given others.

"Sparingly used sub-levels in levels (starting with) '2', '3', '4', '5', and '6' may be withdrawn after seeking sub-level-wise utilization from the operators providing fixed-line services and can be used for future allocations," it said. "After exhausting all the surrendered numbering resources, the existing SDCA codes starting with '6', '3', '4', and '2' may be used for mobile services by suffixing with '0', '1', '8', and '9'," Trai added.

TRAI Will Take Call On Floor Pricing After The Lockdown Ends

Apart from that, TRAI said that it rejected the operators' request to set up the floor pricing as soon as possible. All three leading operators have asked the regulator to fix the floor pricing for prepaid plans. In fact, Airtel, Reliance Jio, and Vodafone-Idea believe that this can save the industry as the government is not providing any relief to them.

On the other hand, TRAI said that setting up floor prices are not good for consumers as it will affect their pockets, and they have shell out more money from their pocket.