Mobile Number Portability leading to Moral Hazard?

                                                                        


The long awaited Mobile number portability has been launched on Jan 20. The purpose of this facility is very apparent. It is for the users to change providers change providers without changing the number. It is for customers with genuine problems. What is the deal for those loyal customers with no complaints with their existing service providers? They use their negotiating skills to earn freebies, I guess this culminates into  a Moral hazard on the part of users.

One of my friends has been using Reliance for 2 years. He had one genuine complaint with regards to the connectivity and with that he managed to negotiate a 6 month rental free plan. In fact I negotiated a 10% discount on the bill amount for the next 6 months. So, loyal users send PORT (your mobile number) to 1900 to carve out any deals.

It was thought that MNP would lead to a lot of churn. In order to avoid that the mobile service providers would strive to improve their deficiencies. On the contrary, surveys show that the churn as a result of MNP has been negligible. The biggest gainer in terms of net additions so far has been Idea. Idea Cellular has managed to woo around 12,000 customers. But these numbers are so meagre to warrant any drastic actions. So quality of services rendered by the service providers would remain the same for now.