The TRAI Bouncer

Recently the The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has brought up the question of mobile number portability to improve the quality of services. What this basically means is that you can have the same mobile number all your life, irrespective of the state where you are or the operator you choose. So if you have a Karnataka Hutch number starting with 9886, 2 years later you could have the same number even if you were in Rajasthan and your operator were to be Airtel. Now you could choose to say "What an Idea" and be known as 9243104*** all your life.
This is bound to have a lot of great advantages. The obvious one being that you never need to worry that you will lose contact with people just because you have changed your operator/state.
But I take pleasure in pointing out the disadvantages concerned here. Ok none of them are life threatening and TRAI need not rollback this IDEA. :D.
Talking of the first one. Lets say you get a call from a particular number(Assume you dont know that number). But due to some reasons, you were not able to pick the call. So what do you do later? Call back once you are free? Here is the Googly. But now you dont know whether its a local number or an STD? So how do you decide what is to be done? Ok you call up and you speak to the person, not realizing that he is in Punjab. You speak for 10 minutes and by this time its already cost you 26 rupees. Ok now that may not be a big amount for a lot of us. But it is for many.
Say the first one may be figured out. Fine now there is a problem with local calls. Too We have A2A, T2T, V2V free offers and a lot of people rely on that. Now you dont call up a person and ask him whether he's got a Tata or a Reliance phone. Again same thing ends up happening.
But I'm not complaining and i like the Idea, I'd like to be known as 9243104*** for ever. :D
One advantage more that I'd love to mention here. Its about the Unsolicited calls you recieve. "Sir, We are offering the HDFC International Credit CArd for free" I got a call like that even today. Not many of us have registered with the "Do-Not-Call Registry". Now we all know that they ring up random local numbers. Its easy now. But wont be so after this has been implemented. So people like me can have some fun with these irritating people who call up...

Signing off
Eddie