The department of Telecom has issued orders to all the prominent telecom operators of India, to begin issuance of 13 digit mobile numbers to customers, in an attempt to improve security.
Reportedly, BSNL has planned to come up with a Machine to machine 13 digit protocol for communication, and this will not be open to general customers. Thus, the customers will not be required to port their 10 digit numbers to 13 digit numbers. Starting from October 1, 2018, the numbers of the existing customers will be ported, and this task has a deadline till December 31, 2018.
Two prime hardware
vendors of BSNL, ZTE and Nokia have so far received a directive from BSNL
regarding the 13 digit numbers. The telecom department had decided in a meeting
held on January 8 that M2M SIM cards will be mandated to have 13
digits, besides adding that the vendors will be in need for infrastructure for
maintenance and handling of M2M mobile numbers from July. M2M is mostly used
for data collection from remote sources.
