Indian Mobile Growth Story – ‘9′ Exhausted, New Numbers to Begin with 8

manish | July 1st, 2009

DoT has exhausted all numbers starting with 9 and new numbers will begin with 8.

Earlier DoT moved ‘95′, which was reserved for Landline numbers to cellular operators; and is now instructing operators to use 8.

DoT is even considering 11 digit numbers from the next year.

This will surely open up new opportunities for operators to make money by auctioning ’special’ numbers (sometimes it can fetch as much as Rs 15 lakh!)

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About the author - Manish is an engineering student and is currently working on his startup idea.

5 Responses to "Indian Mobile Growth Story – ‘9′ Exhausted, New Numbers to Begin with 8"

Raseel says:

July 1, 2009 at 4:10 pm

Wow !! That was fast. How much time has it been .. about 15-17 years since Mobiles were first introduced in the country.

Reply
arvind says:

July 1, 2009 at 4:36 pm

man! That’s interesting…Is India the first country to exhaust a series? [:)]

Reply
abhilash says:

July 2, 2009 at 7:44 am

@arvind – In my recent trip to China I found that they are already using 11 digit cell-phone numbers. So, we are not the 1st county

I think the issue is unnecessarily hyped with 10 digit numbers we can provide numbers to 9,999,999,999 that is approx 10 Billion numbers with India’s population at 1.2 B and cell phone connections at approx 0.4B there is a long way to go.

I know that of the 10B numbers available some would be blocked for special purposes etc. But with 10B numbers if we can get only 1 in 10 (10%) then that would provide for 1B numbers. We still have a good 4 to 5 years to get to reach those many cell connections.

Reply
shande says:

July 5, 2009 at 12:03 am

So who got the number 9999999999 ?

Reply
althaf says:

July 13, 2009 at 9:20 pm

why we are indians get first digit in mobile numbers

Reply