One of the bleeding Indian telco, Aircel has informed India’s telecom watchdog, TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) that it’s shutting down its telecom operation in six telecom circles. These telecom circles include Gujarat, Maharashtra, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh (West).
Aircel has decided to surrender its license in six of the above telecom circles, where it has 2G operations to the telecom regulator by 30th January 2018. The telco will allow its subscribers in the affected area to MNP port out to other operators until 10th March 2018.
Subscribers of Aircel in this six telecom circles will be notified about the service shut down via SMS, Web and other media. These subscribers can start requesting MNP to port out to another telecom operator. The telco has also asked the telecom regulator for an exemption to allow its subscribers who have joined its network in the past 90 days to use the MNP request to port out.
TRAI has directed Aircel to:
- Generate Unique Parting Codes and sent them to the subscribers through SMS immediately.
- Every UPCs generated will be valid until 23:59:59 hours of 10th March 2018. So, until that time you can use the UPC code to MNP port out to another telecom operator.
- Aircel shouldn’t reject any porting-out request of its subscribers whose activation of mobile number is less than ninety days.
- The telco needs to communicate about the closure of service via Newspapers ads and notice on the website.
TRAI has also asked Aircel to provide the status of the number of prepaid and postpaid subscribers as on 30th November 2017. The telco also needs to provide the monthly subscriber-wise information of unspent balance amount for all the ported out prepaid subscribers.
By 20th March 2018, the telco needs to provide the list of the subscribers who could not be ported out and total unspent amount of such subscribers. It also needs to furnish the details of the number of subscribers successfully ported out and remaining subscribers who could not port out with reasons.