Vodafone
India will discontinue services to phone numbers from which subscribers
make no calls, send messages or use applications for 60 days. The main
reason is the shortage of phone numbers after the Department of Telecom
crunched the number allocation criteria recently by linking it to a
mobile phone company’s active subscribers.“Vodafone will discontinue mobile services for prepaid customers on numbers that have no usage i.e., no Voice Calls (incoming or outgoing), SMS and Data for any continuous period of 60 days,” the company said in a statement today.
“This guideline has been implemented because DoT’s stringent guideline for allocation of new number series based on subscribers in VLR (visitor location register) has created acute shortage of numbers, for any telecom company,” the carrier added.
The operator also said that the new customers will be intimated of the deactivation process in their starter kits while existing customers will be informed via SMS and outbound calls wherever possible.