According to a DNA India report, operators in India will soon find the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) focusing increased attention on ensuring they complete their implementation of number portability (MNP).

Even with this increased pressure, a DNA survey found that many systems already in place are far from fully functional. According to the survey, Vodafone (News - Alert) appears to be the only provider claiming 100 percent smooth operation from day one.

This issue shines light on the challenges facing least cost routing capabilities. In fact, the survey found that only 44 percent of Bharti Airtel (News - Alert) customers were able to get their unique porting code (UPC) within one hour of requesting it. TRAI guidelines require operators to generate and deliver UPC “forthwith” through an automated process when the subscriber requests it through SMS.

By contrast, Airtel customers often received “feedback” calls from the operator’s customer service agents several hours after they send the UPC request – before they were able to secure the code itself. The majority of the customers had to wait two to 22 hours before they received their UPC.

Idea Cellular and Reliance Communications (News - Alert) appear to be leveraging least cost routing to help promote a smoother process. Still, TRAI officials claim that delays in delivering the UPC are unacceptable and the regular plans to soon take steps to force operators to comply with its guidelines, which dictate that the process should be automated, require no human intervention and that the code be delivered immediately.

Number portability is also an issue in the U.S. as 40 percent of all telephone calls are made to ported numbers. Least cost routing is an important focus here as routing calls based on the dialed telephone number can cause as many as 40 percent of these calls to be misrouted. When calls are misrouted, VoIP service providers find that the quality of service is degraded and termination fees are increased by 15 to 25 percent. This heightens the importance of number portability correction.

To drive an effective solution, operators are seeking to route telephone calls based on the routing number, and not on the dialed telephone number. This least cost routing can deliver measurable benefits. For SIP service providers, however, sending a number portability query to an external database adds to the expense and critical dependency on an external network resource.

TransNexus’ (News - Alert) OSPrey-NP number portability server helps to address this problem by offering a simple, low cost, high performance software platform to host the U.S. number portability database locally within the network. The OSPrey-NP server will automatically stay synchronized with the U.S. Number Portability Administration Center to ensure every network has a near real-time copy of the NPAC.