We have grown accustomed to 10 digit mobile numbers quite a lot. Almost everyone in India has a mobile phone number. The one thing that has stayed common throughout this whole time is the fact that all mobile phone numbers in India have been of 10 digits.
Once upon a time, landline numbers were of 7 digits but the Government made a change in 2002 which made including 2 before the numbers mandatory. In tier 2 cities this made landline numbers go from 6 to 7 digits. That was a big change back then.
Currently, because of limited space left in the 10 digits mobile directory, there would be a shift to 13 digit mobile numbers. Now how this would affect the existing mobile numbers is not defined as of yet.
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Why is it being done?
This is being done because of the exponential growth of mobile phone users has led to the exhaustion of the 10 digits mobile directory. Starting from 1st of July 2018 everyone who gets a new mobile phone number would have a 13 digit number.
For this to work successfully current mobile phones would also need to go through an update. All of the existing mobile numbers in India would also get either a prefix or suffix number in order to make sure they become compatible with this new system.
Or maybe the existing numbers would work as it is without any changes, that’s something which is still not clear yet.
But is it for real?
This news was floated around February too and many publications dismissed it by saying that DoT i.e. the Department of Telecommunication was just updating M2M (Machine to Machine) numbers. If this is still the same case is yet to be known!
According to Department of Telecommunication, a formal notice has been issued to all of the major Telecom operators to ensure ease of deployment.
According to a senior official at BSNL, all of the old numbers would be updated in the same way by 31st December 2018. The process for the same would start from October 2018. According to the same source, officials are still discussing whether there should be a prefix to the existing numbers or suffix.
Source: Jagran
Do you think that it’s time to move on to 13 digit numbers from 10? Are you excited about the same? Do let us know in the comments section below. Personally, it would be very challenging if every 10 digit number also has to have a suffix/prefix to make it 13. Let’s see what happens in the near future!
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