Scarcity of new numbers may hit telecom industry by June next year

22 October, 2012

The burgeoning number of active mobile users in the country is although a good news for the telecom industry, but on the sad part, operators are about to run short on phone number series, alloted to them by the government.

THE NUMBER series beginning with 98 or 99 may end by the middle of the next year with the industry adding millions of new customers every month. Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), the representative body of GSM service providers like Airtel, Vodafone, Idea has said that there might arise serious problems if a new series of numbers is not allloted by the June of next year.

“We are theoretically reaching the limit of existing number sets with a subscriber base of one billion," Rajan Mathews, DG, COAI told The Times of India.

One of the various solutions of the likely problem is allotment of 11 or 12-digit phone numbers. The telecom department is looking towards other solutions as well.

Allocation of numbers to operators is done in batches, which entirely depends upon number of factors like the size of subscriber base and efficiency in utilizing existing number sets. The batch system is followed to avoid chaos.

Industry at its end has already started taking steps to deal with the problem. One of the steps is to cancel the connection of inactive users and allot the number to new users.

In July 2012, RCom removed almost all the inactive subscribers from its network. Telecom majors - Airtel, Vodafone and Idea have also done away with their inactive subscribers amounting to around 4 millions in July.