Telecom industry regulator, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has shown that the Karnataka telecom circle recorded the most number of mobile number portability requests at 10.20 million since the facility was launched in the country.

The Mobile Number Portability (MNP) facility allows mobile phone users to change their telecom service providers without changing their phone numbers. In the country, more than 84.26 million subscribers have submitted requests for accessing MNP facility till January 2013. About 4.20 million subscriber requests were received by telecom operators in the month of January this year.

Rajasthan recorded the second highest number of requests at 7.96 million, ahead of Andhra Pradesh with 7.62 million requests and Gujarat had 7.34 million requests. Among the major cities, Mumbai had 2.94 million MNP requests, Delhi had 2.74 million requests and Kolkata had 1.91 million requests.

Experts say that the number of MNP requests are expected to rise significantly as the government is planning to allow subscribers to use the same number even if they move to a new telecom circle, under the new nationwide MNP services.

Meanwhile, the government had recently observed that telecom service providers have not agreed to portability requests on several cases against the provisions of the laws. TRAI has released a directive to the companies to comply with the Mobile Number Portability (MNP) regulations.