The Executive Vice Chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission, Dr. Eugene Juwah spoke to journalists on the recent transformation taking place in the nation’s telecommunication industry. NGOZI OBOH who attended the meeting reports.
It is contradicting to say that Registration of SIM Cards will end soon but will still continue. Can you explain further Sir
If you recall the exercise began on March 28, 2011.? As the exercise comes to a close, subscribers whose SIM Cards are not registered will be deemed not to be interested in the process or that the SIMs have been abandoned, and will be disconnected.???
Our objective is not to exclude people permanently from making calls, the registration for new customers will continue and this makes it a continuous exercise. But the bulk registration for old SIM cards is the one that will end soon.
Can? you put a timeline to the commencement of Mobile Number Portability
The contract has been awarded and it will come on in the last quarter of this year. The contract specifically said that infrastructure for the contractor, for the operator will take six months and i can assure you there are monthly deliverables in these six months by which we can confirm that it is in line with the terms of the contract.
After the six months there are two months to test the equipment which brings it to a total of 8 months. We are looking at September or at least, by the last quarter of this year. Mobile Number Portability will broaden the choices available to subscribers and on its own impose a code of behaviour on the operators who will want to provide top notch services in order to retain their subscribers.
The success of Number Portability also rides on successful registration of SIM Cards and creation of SIM Card data base of integrity. As I have already told you, we are doing that at the moment.
How has the NCC been enforcing its regulations across the country
Without a doubt, mobile Number Portability will impact on the quality of service on our various networks although other cardinal steps are being taken to ensure that our service providers are constantly kept on their toes to make them give the best services to their subscribers.
To this end the Compliance and Enforcement Unit has been strengthened to enable the Commission enforce its regulations and directives. Recently, the Unit had embarked on a lot of enforcement activities; you must be aware of such activities all over the country. It was a painful action to take but we realised that if we have to confront some key problems facing the industry like quality of service, some organisations and individuals must be pulled into line, which process would invariably cause some discomfort and corporate embarrassment, not to mention financial loss.
However, that notwithstanding, going forward more vigorous enforcement actions are continuing. Only last Friday, 17th February 2012, the Commission’s Enforcement Unit carried out enforcement actions against some mobile device dealers who flood our markets with non-type approved devices, which in turn affect quality of service of the various networks.
Do you have plans for the Fixed Lines?? When will they come alive
We have laid out comprehensive plans to further excite the Communications sector. We have broad plans for Broadband deployment to enable us create and impact the whole nation. To implement this we have adopted the open access model as platform; we are also looking at resuscitating the Fixed Line sector by giving out new licenses and in doing this, increase telephony penetration.
The success of this twin action will give Nigerians an enhanced choice of products and services, reduce overreliance on mobile services and encourage internet usage.
NCC had variously promised improved networks yet the situation is getting worse. People now carry two phones or dual SIM phones or more. When will these anomalies come to an end
People carry two phones but you do not have to carry dual phones. It does not improve the network. The issue of quality of service has been long, it didn’t start today. The problem is that when investment started coming into Nigeria for mobile? phones and because there was a great hunger for telephony services, the issue of quality of service was kind of relegated that people will be able to communicate.
Now what has happened was that the projection by the service provider were too low than the demands that came? What is happening today is that there are issues of congestion. What will do you in that situation you will make extra investment to reduce the congestion and I can assure you that, the major operators are making huge investment. Infact some of the quality of service issue we are seeing is because they are tearing down facilities and replacing them with high capacity ones but in doing this also there could be some impediments for them.
A city like Abuja is highly congested. If for example, FCT does not allow operators to build base stations, without base stations you cannot make call. In central area of Abuja and many other areas it is very difficult to build base stations almost impossible. So we are working with fct to see whether this can be relaxed a little bit so that more base stations can be built, so that the congestion will be reduced. I can tell you today that a new of regime of quality of service regulation has come into force .
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Nigerians lose handsets as a result of handset theft among others. What is NCC doing about this
NCC actually before my coming there embarked on a project to bar stolen phones but this project was not successful. Basically 50 per cent of phones in Nigeria come from China. The phones are fake. They have what is called a batch equipment number so all of them or say 5million of them have the same equipment identity number.
The way you bar stolen? phone is through the equipment identity number registry where each handset has a unique equipment identity number which is stored when you register and then when it is stolen, through this number they can detected and the phone won't be able to make calls but because for some reasons we gave a lot of fake phones, manufactured? without paying attention to international standard, you don’t blame NCC for this issue.
Without phones having unique identity equipment number, if you bar one numbers it will bar about 5 million phones and then there will be a problem. So this is really a major impediment.
It is believed that the NCC instead of regulating the telecom sector is protecting the operators to the detriment of the consumers. Do we see this coming to an end anytime soon
We do not protect operators. It is wrong and i stand by what I say. We are the regulator and we stand between the operator and the consumer. We are not here to close down operators, I have to tell you that. They are doing a great job. They have provided the largest number of employment for Nigeria in the past 8 years.
They contribute substantially to our economy, you have to be a neutral arbiter that do things according to the law and also take care of where there are difficulties while all the time maintaining the interest of the country. The notion that we protect the operators is not true.
We have closed down the office of a major operator and journalists refused to publish it. We try to do the best we can to be the middleman while recognizing also that operators contribute a lot to our economy. We must not do things that will further harm our economy.
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