Telenor & MNP

The image below is from an extremely low income area – infact, a slum in Karachi. A small cabin-shop that deals in mobile phones, PCO and allied services is serving the population of the katchi abadi.

Owning a cell phone is pretty common even in the very-low income groups in (at least) the bigger cities of Pakistan – thanks to the celluar services boom we are finding ourselves in these days.

As could be seen from the poster visible in the image below, someone who cannot even spell Telenor correctly has pasted these posters across most of similar shops in the slum announcing the MNP facility. When I inquired about this from the shopkeeper whether this is a service exclusive to his outfit he replied in negative saying instead that this is being ‘done by the company’. As we can well decipher, it does not seem like a Telenor’s official announcement but it is almost certain that Telenor has at least some amount of resources dedicated for hooking up even the baseline low ARPU customers into its folds via the MNP route most probably via some sort of market agents.