You are a Bharti Airtel mobile-phone customer and haven’t made a single call or send a message in two months? Chances are that it’s sufficient reason soon for your number to be deactivated.
For, the country’s leading service provider has made such a proposal to Trai. What’s more, the telecom regulator has said it would consider the matter that Airtel suggested last month. Out of the total wireless base of 860 million, only 70 per cent of the subscriber (608.6 million) base is active, according to Trai data till end-August this year. The regulator has defined as “active” those subscribers who have made at least one call in a month.
Currently, a mobile subscriber with a lifetime validity has to recharge his number once in 6 months. For a non-lifetime user, after disconnection, the number is not allotted to any other subscriber for next 3 months.
The capital-headquartered Airtel says it is making this request because the numbering resources have become a problem. According to the revised criteria related to a new numbering series, the operators will be allocated a new series on the basis of active user base, which is also called in technical terminology VLR (visitor location register).
However, the move, if accepted, would also help telcos shore up their ARPU (average revenue per user) that has been falling owing to low or no usage by a large number of subscribers.
Currently, the average ARPU of the industry is around Rs 150-160.
More From This Section
Multi-SIMs would mean that a large percentage of the subscribers does not register on the VLR. This is because these customers do not use their SIMs for long periods of time, Airtel said in its letter to Trai.
To overcome the limitation of these subscribers not getting counted in the VLR subscriber base, the company, along with Bharti Hexacom, would follow a process: deactivate those SIMs which remain inactive for a period in excess of 60 days, the letter added.
The 1995-founded Airtel has 171.8 million users by this August end. Of them, 88.8 per cent is active. According to a Bharti Airtel official, the company is suggesting this step because of the new criteria for numbering series. “Most of the lifetime card users or dual-SIM handset users do not get counted in the VLR because of minimal or virtually no usage,” he notes.
The Cellular Operators Association of India says a shortage of numbering series has prompted all operators to launch an overall clean-up drive. “Secondly,” its director-general Rajan Mathews notes, “DoT has also decided to allocate the numbering series based on the active user base.” Besides, the (already done) verification process for the old customers led to some disconnections, as there were no proper identity proofs, he adds.