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The Telcordia Number Portability Gateway promises to streamline number porting processes for service providers by integrating their internal operations with their national number portability clearinghouse
NC News Network, May 6 2009, 1100 hrs
Number portability, which allows subscribers to maintain their telephone numbers when changing service providers, is gaining momentum around the world. Recently, MNP Interconnection Telecom Solutions, a joint venture of Telcordia, was selected by the India Department of Telecommunications (DoT) as the provider of number portability clearinghouse and centralized database services for the country’s southern and eastern regions for the next 10 years.
The company says that this will facilitate accurate number porting for subscribers, enabling the transfer of telephone numbers when subscribers want to keep their numbers if they move from one operator to another. Mark Greenquist, President & CEO, Telcordia said, “The recent number portability clearinghouse deal will bring added choice and convenience to India’s 400 million mobile subscribers.”
The company says that it’s Number Portability Gateway is designed to simplify and automate management of all number porting related processes — including port in/port out, disconnect/snapback, initiation/activation, hold/cancel, call routing, and validation.
Central to the system is a function that controls and organizes the messages flowing externally between the national clearinghouse and the service provider’s environment, as well as across its internal systems. Whether the service provider chooses to send messages manually or automatically between the gateway and clearinghouse, the processor logs all messages in the system’s port history database, puts them in a queue, takes them off the queue, and performs the specified actions for each message, including forwarding it to the appropriate output destination and updating network systems on port and number status.
The database within the Number Portability Gateway maintains all the data required to exchange transaction information between the national clearinghouse and the service provider’s systems, including interface definitions, validation rules, and the data to identify other operators, timer parameters, and configurations.
The company says that service providers can also use the Number Portability Gateway database to quickly extract data and build their own reports. The stored transactional data can be easily assembled into user-defined historical or trend-related reports on porting activities and processes.
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