Mobile number portability has not been popular in China, with only around 50,000 people using the service during a-six month trial.
China Dailyreports that the government is exploring ways to improve the popularity of MNP after the indifferent public response to trials in two cities.
China began a trial of MNP in Tianjin and Hainan last year, in an anti-monopoly move.
But advisors to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) reportedly feel that there are still too many barriers to porting numbers, including operators' binding contract terms.
The inability to port numbers not registered to a real name is also serving as a barrier to adoption.
The MIIT acknowledges that the 50,000 or so ported numbers fell well below their expectations for the trial, as around 15 million mobile subscribers reside in the two cities.
This is an MNP churn rate of less than 0.5%, the MIIT's China Academy of Telecommunication Research told the paper, and compares to a global average of between 2% and 3%.
But a Gartner analyst said the low adoption is to be expected, and proves that the three operators are “actually in an unspoken partnership.”