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Contents 1 Rules that apply for the article 2 Discussions 2.1 Recent changes and updates 2.1.1 Country or territory name 2.1.2 MCC 2.1.3 MCC 2.1.4 Operator 2.1.5 Operational Status 2.1.6 Technology and Frequency (MHz) 2.2 How you can help 2.3 Table formatting 2.3.1 Operator names 2.3.2 Operational status 2.3.3 Technology 2.3.4 Machine readability 2.3.5 Longevity 2.4 Discussion 2.4.1 External links 2.4.2 Technology type 2.4.3 MSISDN prefixes 2.4.4 Machine readability 2.4.5 Content of this article 2.5 Airtel 2.6 Requested move 2.6.1 Survey 2.6.2 Discussion 2.7 clarify relations of this list with the various standards 2.8 Rogers Wireless Canada 2.9 Suggestions for enhancements

[edit] Rules that apply for the article

The article is meant to be suitable for parsing by machine, and should adhere to some strict rules.

There is one chapter per country. The chapter consists of a table according to this layout:

MCC	MNC	Operator	Operational Status	Technology and Frequency (MHz)
000	00	Operator name	Operational	GSM 900

The columns are:

• MCC and MNC in numerical order.
• Operator should show the currently used brand first. Previously used brands is placed after a slash. Owning company can be placed in paernthesis thereafter. But operator's previous names and its shareholders we can write in details in this operator's own article. E.g. Orange Moldova S.A. / Voxtel (France Telecom) - we write Orange and put a link to Orange Moldova page.
• Operational status Only one of these:
  • Reserved: allocated by the relevant regulatory body, but not yet in use
  • Operational: allocated by the relevant regulatory body, and in use today
  • Not operational: allocated by the relevant regulatory body, but no longer in use
  • Unknown
• Technology and Frequency (MHz) contains a list of pairs, separated by slashes. The first part is the technology (GSM, UMTS etc) the second is the frequency band (900, 1800, 1900 etc)

NOTE: Please update and clarify the above rules as appropriate

[edit] Discussions

[edit] Recent changes and updates

---

I want to inform you that I have changed the structure of article MNC. Now it looks different to that it was before today. So what I have done? First of all I removed table of contest which I think was too large. The list of more than 200 countries was inconvenient and I changed the TOC limits to 2. For the countries list I applied compact table of contest with links only to the first letter of the country. Hope it will not make article worse. Second, the table width was enlarged to 100%. We don't need to loose 5% for the blank page. The free space is important. Now the table looks like that

MCC	MNC	Operator	Operational Status	Technology and Frequency (MHz)
000	00	Operator name	Operational	GSM 900

It will reduce the double-line cells and (as I know lots of you are printing this page) will be more readable when printing on A4-size paper.

So I tried to do everything to be better than it was and to make our article easier for future updates.

And now the most important thing. It is about updating the article and changing the information of it.

[edit] Country or territory name

All the list of countries is taken from the UN list. If the country is not oficially independent and recognized by other countries in brackets is written which country it is part of. For example today one person created for Kosovo separate headline. I changed it to Kosovo (Serbia). So please, no political disputes here.

[edit] MCC

It is clear. We are writing mobile country codes. In case if country has two or more this codes we are writing it in increasing order.

[edit] MCC

The same in increasing order. If you don't know operator's MCC put "?" sing and write the line in the end of country's list of operators.

[edit] Operator

I suggest us to write only operator's name - name under which it is providing its services (brand). Most of us need new information about it. But operator's previous names and its shareholders we can write in details in this operator's own article. E.g. Orange Moldova S.A. / Voxtel (France Telecom) - we write Orange and put a link to Orange Moldova page. Don't forget that our article is called MNC and we should focus on it rather than on shareholders etc. Especially, in most of cases operator has more than one shareholder.

[edit] Operational Status

Only three:

• Operational
• Not operational
• Unknown

No more information or explanations what had happened with its MNC and so on. I repeat our article is called MNC, and all explanation purposes and history of operator you can write in corresponding article.

[edit] Technology and Frequency (MHz)

I thought it was clear, but as I see it is not. So before writing something please read List of mobile phone standards article. First write standard, then frequency of this standard (e.g. ST1 FR1 / ST2 FR2).

Thanks everybody for future improvements of the article. I hope you will appreciate my work. Waiting for your comments and opinion.--Dima1 (talk) 21:53, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

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[edit] How you can help

For those who would like to contribute to this page, please:

• Link to operators (see machine readability, below)
• Verify the data
• Check for omissions
• Hunt around for the operators' operating statuses and frequencies

[edit] Table formatting

Table example:

MCC	MNC	Operator	Operational Status	Technology and Frequency (MHz)
000	00	Operator name	Operational	GSM 900

[edit] Operator names

The following convention should be used for the operator's name:

Currently used brand / previously used brands (Owning company)

e.g.:

3 / Orange (Hutchison 3G)

[edit] Operational status

Please use ONLY the following operational statuses:

• Reserved: allocated by the relevant regulatory body, but not yet in use
• Operational: allocated by the relevant regulatory body, and in use today
• Not operational: allocated by the relevant regulatory body, but no longer in use

In all other cases write Unknown.

[edit] Technology

Please enter the technology and licensed frequencies in use, separated with slash (/). Do not append "MHz", this is in the table column header. If the frequency or frequencies are not known, use "Unknown"

e.g. CDMA 450 / GSM 800 / GSM 1900 / UMTS 2100 etc.

[edit] Machine readability

Please ensure that the table remains machine-readable where possible, so that applications may easily import the table. Hyperlinks should be used only to the operators' Wikipedia's page. Please do NOT use footnotes or add other data to the table, instead putting the additional information on the operator's Wikipedia page.

[edit] Longevity

Please DO NOT REMOVE ENTRIES unless the relevant regulatory body has NOT allocated this tuple.

[edit] Discussion

[edit] External links

• I am strongly against external links, so please keep links limited to Wiki-links. I have removed the few UK links that were there already. -- Egil 17:43, 24 July 2007 (UTC)
• Agreed - changes made in instructions above. David n m bond 17:59, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Technology type

• Should there not also be an entry that shows what type of technology? I.e GSM, CDMA, iDEN etc. There are traces of this already in "Frequency", maybe we could add it there? -- Egil 17:41, 24 July 2007 (UTC)
• I'd be happy for the "frequency" field to change to a "technology" field. That makes more sense anyway, as there is insufficient information available currently. I will make the changes now. I've also updated the instructions above. David n m bond 17:59, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] MSISDN prefixes

• Florianbruch made a well-intentioned attempt to add MDSISDN prefixes to this article (He called them pstns). I agree with Dima1 that these require their own page, but what should we call the page, and what fields should the table contain? I'm open to ideas. David n m bond 00:33, 29 July 2007 (UTC)
  • With number portability MSISDN prefixes don't always "remain true" Auroria 9:20, 25 Sept 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Machine readability

• Could someone provide instructions on how to best read the table (preferably using perl)?

I have a table that includes networkid, countryid, and network name from an application on Nokia S60 phones around the world. I've added several entries to the article's table, but it is tiresome to do manually. If someone wants to do it for me I can give them the URL for my table. The majority seem to already have entries, but there are definitely some that are in my table that are missing in the article's. Davidmaxwaterman 03:49, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

• You can give me this URL, please.--Dima1 06:06, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
• On 21st September, Dima1 made a major change which affected machine readability. He stated: "such structure will be easier to edit data for each country, because a lot of people were afraid of editing so large articles". This change was undone, as it affected machine readability. If you are afraid of changing the article due to the table structure, please contribute to this discussion thread. David n m bond 13:51, 21 September 2007 (UTC)
• Please discuss any table structure changes here before implementing David n m bond 13:51, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

Article contained only one table. It was not convenient for its changing. Now it contains from one table per country. I think it is the best variant for such big articles. You can also see as an example articles:

• List of mobile network operators of Europe
• List of mobile network operators of the Americas
• List of mobile network operators of the Asia Pacific region
• List of mobile network operators of the Middle East and Africa

Imagine what would be if there was only one table. Would anyone want to change it in that case?--Dima1 15:20, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

I must admit to not really seeing why machine readability would prevent breaking it up the way Dima1 is talking about, I'm not even convinced that the page should be machine readable in the first place. Wikipedia is intended for reading by humans, and the page formatting should be oriented towards that.

It's already too large and too cumbersome to scroll through. Firefox slows to an absolute crawl when trying to edit the page and view the changes (or viewing a diff between an older and newer version.) If the page absolutely must have all these operators on it, and can't be broken up geographically as Dima1 suggests, perhaps we could move some of the raw content over to a set of templates? Just a suggestion, --Squiggleslash 15:38, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

I would like to say my opinion: I do not like the splitted version because when reading the table (as human) I am disturbed by all the title lines of the tables (MCC, MNC, ... and that is in bold overmore!) Das-ausgeschlafene-Mammut 15:47, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

This page is (as far as I know) the only freely-accessible place to obtain the full MCC/MNC list. My experience in network operations is that many mobile phone operators worldwide have applications which require a full MCC/MNC table and must import from somewhere. This page seems to be a good source of such data. It would be crazy to create separate human and machine readable pages, so I suggest we compromise with the "single-table" format. I'm happy that the page change format, but let's work out the correct format on the discussion page before making major changes to the page format. In the meanwhile, we can all get on with updating the content! I suggest a period of 1 month while we propose different page formats and then take a vote. David n m bond 20:59, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

I really have a number of problems with this:

First, as I said above, the page is becoming unmanagably large, with at least one browser, Firefox, seriously choking on it when you try to do a diff. It's open to question how much of this stuff has to be on one page.

Second, I'm really not seeing the justification for this being machine readable at all. Wikipedia is not a first hand source, and the information on this page is (already) unreliable (I'm dreading fixing all the CDMA2000 references - why is that standard even listed? Whether an operator has a CDMA2000 network or not (and some listed as doing do not) isn't relevent except for the tiny minority that use R-UIMs.) So who is going to periodically scan Wikipedia with an automated script to import this information into what kind of application? Anyone who does this professionally is being terribly unprofessional, and anyone doing this for their own personal use strikes me as unlikely to need the information to be constantly updated in this way.

Third, the page's usability is compromised by the need to make it "machine readable", and the primary focus of any Wikipedia page should be on human, not machine, use. It, at the very least, ought to be broken up into smaller pages, or failing that, broken up into multiple tables as proposed above.

Fourth, having multiple tables, as long as they're in the same, consistent, format, does not in any way make the page unreadable by computer programs. So the argument against multiple tables is a false one: There is neither any compelling reason to make the page machine readable, nor any reason why the proposed changes would prevent it from being machine readable.

My preference right now is that the page should at least be broken up into separate tables, preferably on separate pages. I would primarily divide by continent rather than break each country up into separate tables because I agree with Das-ausgeschlafene-Mammut above that the presence of table headings every few lines was distracting. --Squiggleslash 12:51, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

My proposal remains that we need to create separate table of this kind for each country.

MCC	MNC	Operator	Operational Status	Technology and Frequency (MHz)
1	2	3	4	5

This version gives us: fast switching between countries, easier to change and update information.

Editing page like it is now (one table for all countries and operators) is impossible for low speed computers and inconvenient for searching while editing. Machine readability in my opinion doesn't suffer in such a great mode as you tell. One table of 77Kb is bad table! --Dima1 11:21, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

All - I'm coming round to the idea of splitting the article up as Dima1 advocates. I think my problem was more with the way this was done - with no discussion first. How about this - we split the page up as Dima1 did recently, but refrain from changing the page format without first having a discussion. That way, those who are screen-scraping data will have some warning and can get their regular expressions warmed up! I would like to keep all the content on one page, however - it's much easier to look for an operator that way, when you're not sure which continent it's on! David n m bond 21:08, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

OK. Done. You can check it.--Dima1 08:31, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Content of this article

First I would like to say that this is a great page which helps me lots at my work. What I would like to discuss here is following: Some matters are not very clear and seem inconsistent to me with the content and title of this article (please compare also my edit at the discussion page of article "List of mobile country codes"). Just above the table is stated that it contains the complete list of mobile phone operators - what it is not. It is a list of GSM PLMN codes (PLMN identifications, or as stated at the top of the article: a list of MCC/MNC tuples). This should be clarified, shouldn't it? One more fact that this cannot be called a list of mobile phone operators is that the list includes some operators more than one time - when the have assigned more than one MNC in a country. Another thing I want to discuss: As I can assume from the section "operational status" this list should also contain MNCs which have just been assigned but are not in use by a mobile phone operator. I am afraid that regarded from this aspect the list is very incomplete since you would have check out all the country-specific bodies and what MNCs they have assigned. For example when I look at Austria the list is very incomplete because there are several more assigned MNC as listed here. I would suggest not to distinguish if the MNC was assinged or not - but distinguish by another point of view: "Operational" and "Not operational" ... whereby "Not operational" means that either this MNC was or will be operational soon (i.e. a new network is planned). For these MNCs a new column called "Notes" (or "Comments", ...) would be helpful to add some information (as some guy did at the current version of the article for MNC 09 of Greece). And then it should be also defined what means "in use today"? Does this mean a mobile phone operator has issued SIM cards where this MNC forms part of the IMSI and/or does it mean the operator does send this MNC (together with the MCC) on the broadcast channel? So, now I have yet another thing what is somewhat confusing to me: The column "Operator": It's a confusing thing (especially with some mobile operators) to tell the correct company name and/or the brand name(s) - some of them are not even consistent on their own homepages. The explanation given on the discussion page must be visible on the main article page - how should a reader know that there is first the brand name, then the owning company name? Regarding the rule from the discussion page there we have some mistakes in the table. How could we solve this? Maybe separate the column into "Brand" and "Company name"? Former company names could be listed in the "Notes" column (what I suggested to create above). Das-ausgeschlafene-Mammut 15:32, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

"Just above the table is stated that it contains the complete list of mobile phone operators - what it is not (etc.)". True - please change this text to what you believe it should state!

"I look at Austria the list is very incomplete". True. Pelase complete the Austria list.

"...a new column called "notes" (or "comments", ...)". This was tried before and got very messy. My proposed solution was to add the notes on the operator page linked to from that line.

"The column "Operator": It's a confusing thing (especially with some mobile operators)". Agreed - this is not a well defined column. Please propose a better definition.

"we have some mistakes in the table. How could we solve this?" Correct them!

"Former company names could be listed in the 'Notes' column" ...or removed completely?

David n m bond 20:59, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Airtel

The frequency for Aitel is also GSM 900. --16:40, 21 December 2007 (UTC)16:40, 21 December 2007 (UTC) --!!Rsrikanth05 (talk) 16:41, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Requested move

[edit] clarify relations of this list with the various standards

I think it would help a lot to clearly state which specs this list adheres to. Reading the

List of Mobile Network Code (MNC) for the international identification plan for mobile terminals and mobile users

there is a lot less stuff. This list seems to take into account the national specific standards, therefore it would be nice to add a link to all of them. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.14.52.82 (talk) 23:01, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

I believe this is all pretty ad hoc. Previously data was available from the GSM Association, but that seems to no longer be the case. The list from ITU seems to be not complete, FWIW. "Network Norway" is one specific case I see immediately. -- Egil (talk) 16:48, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Rogers Wireless Canada

I believe thhe frequency for Rogers wireless is GSM 1900 MHz. Source: http://shoprogersfaq.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/shoprogersfaq.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_sid=NLh39m5j&p_lva=&p_faqid=638&p_created=1006404878&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPTEmcF9ncmlkc29ydD0mcF9yb3dfY250PTI5JnBfc2VhcmNoX3RleHQ9ZnJlcXVlbmN5JnBfc2VhcmNoX3R5cGU9NCZwX3Byb2RfbHZsMT1_YW55fiZwX3Byb2RfbHZsMj1_YW55fiZwX3NvcnRfYnk9ZGZsdCZwX3BhZ2U9MQ**&p_li= If someone else can confirm this (I too thought they operated on the 850 MHz band as well), the article should be updated to reflect this. Crazymapleleaf (talk) 13:39, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Suggestions for enhancements

1. I suggest that the very first part of this page shows the current rules that we play by, so anyone new does not have to read the entire discussion. (has been implemented already, please enhance)
2. The rules for the name of the operator with parenthesis and slashes are confusing, and as far as I can see they do not work because people do not read the rules. I suggest we have one column that shows the commercial, short name, and one that shows the formal name of the operator. Previous names can be in the notes column, as appropriate. The brand name corresponds to what will be shown as the operator name on a mobile phone.
3. There should be an extra column for notes, unstructured comments, references and such. It should be restricted in size and coverage, anything beyond a few words needs to go in the article for the operator proper.
4. "Operational Status" renamed to "Status" to optimize space usage for the other columns in the table (in addition it broke the WP rules of use of capitals, anyway).
5. "Technology and Frequency (MHz)" should be renamed to optimize space usage for the other columns in the table. One suggestion is "Technology and bands (MHz)", (band is a more accurate term than frequency), which can be further shortened,

To summarize, here is my suggestion:

MCC	MNC	Brand	Operator	Status	Bands (MHz)	References and notes
334	03	movistar	Telefónica Móviles México	Not operational	GSM 1900 / UMTS 850	This is not real data

I can go through with the actual implementation. -- Egil (talk) 09:10, 15 June 2008 (UTC)