India to get mobile numbers starting with 8!

Cross-Posted from Saurabh Minni’s blog with his permission

Well its was well known that mobile numbers with 8 are going to start soon. But it so happened that my dear friend Daaku took a new Tata Docomo connection. Now the amazing thing was that it starts with 805xx-xxxxx. So now if I try to call this friend of mine, my Vodafone network tells me that its an invalid number. I was confused and so I asked my friend daaku to call me. I got his number in caller ID but calling it was again not possible. Obviously its not mistake in dialing the number, rather its a stupid things that Vodafone and possibly other networks too have done.

So here is my guess what has happened. Vodafone, takes the number +91805xx-xxxxx as 91 for country(that India), 80(Code for Bangalore) and 5 would be Tata Indicom as they provide landline with that series. Interestingly Vodafone seems to have not configured its network to this change which happened for mobile numbers starting with 8.

I tried contacting Vodafone customer care, they seemed to be unaware of the issue and they said they would get back to me soon(24hours it seems).

But the point here is, whats TRAI and DoT doing. Have they not informed the operators of this change or are the operators at lax. Who ever it might be, the fault must be found and it must be ensured that in future such stupid things do not happen.