All mobile numbers in India starts with 9, 8 or 7, this includes pager services, but the use of pagers is on the decline. Each telecom circle is allowed to have multiple private operators, earlier it was 2 private + BSNL/MTNL, subsequently it was changed to 3 private + BSNL/MTNL in GSM, now each telecom circle has more than 10 operators including BSNL/MTNL. All mobile phone numbers are 10 digits long. The way to split the numbers is defined in the National Numbering Plan 2003 as XXXX-NNNNNN where XXXX indicates the network operator and telecom circle, and NNNNNN is the subscriber numbers.