The Executive Vice Chairman, Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Dr. Eugene Juwah spoke with journalist at the launch of Mobile Number Portability (MNP) in Lagos, recently. He clarified certain grey areas and declaring that MNP was introduced to deepen competition.
Excerpts:
IF the owner of the number cannot present a credible
valid ID card for the registration of that person, it could be shown that the
number does not belong to that person, otherwise anybody who wants to port
provided there is no problem his identification, he can port. We are going to
put in the regulation to guide porting so that any porting refusal from any
operator would attract penalty.
Any data you have in your SIM with
your current operator will no longer exist when you port to another operator
because the new operator cannot put data into your SIM. It is only you who can
put data in your SIM. So, your willingness to port out of your current provider
into a new one means that you are discarding your old operator with all its
services.
Porting takes place only when you
are willing to port and you have prepared to port. When you port you get a new
service and we want to believe you are porting because you are dissatisfied
with the old operator, so that when you port you disregard all the services
from your old operator and that also has to do
with the data in the SIM.
If there is difficulty in porting,
we expect that report should be made either to the NCC or to the operator, and
we will act on it.
Will anything change with regards
to MNP and registration of SIM cards?
The issue of porting should be
separated from the issue of SIM card registration. If you want to port, you
have to fill a form saying you want to port. It has nothing to do with the
database of SIM card registration and you have to also show that it is you by
presenting an ID card and this is the
process of porting.
Now, when porting, it has to be
counter checked whether you are registered or not and the registration database
has to be effected and that registration would also conclude and confirm that
the number belongs to you. About the SIM card registration, we have collated
the data that was submitted to us as at the end of the SIM card registration
and I can assure you that the SIM card registration itself would very soon come
to an end and anybody that has not registered will be barred from making calls
in Nigeria.
As I have said, for you to port,
there must be a confirmation that you are the owner of the SIM card. Also, you
must provide a valid ID, which means it has to be checked that you are formally
registered with your original service provider before porting is allowed. The
security service itself has nothing to do with porting.
How will porting deepen
competition?
Number portability is to deepen
competition. For example, if you are on a network and you don’t like the
quality of service or network, you can move to the other network, that you
think has a better quality of services. What we expect in the long run is that
it won’t compound the issue of quality of service. There will be a virtual
redistribution. People will move from one network to the other balancing out
quality of service.
Even if you move to a network that
you think that is good, people will also move to a network that is freer, so in
the long run, it would help to solve the issue perhaps not totally but it will
contribute to resolving the issue of quality of service.
How is NCC planning to contain the
SIM cards to be discarded by those porting because it could constitute
environmental hazard?
The SIM card does not contain
hazardous chemicals. It only contains paper and metal and I am sure that most
of our SIM cards are not being in use and when you port, you remove your old
SIM and insert the new one. As far as NCC knows right now, SIM card does not
constitute environmental hazard.
What happens to credit in the SIM
before porting?
On the issue of credits in the SIM
card, NCC had advised during the media campaign that subscribers should
utilized their credits before they port, because the credit on your SIM cannot
be transferred from one network to the other because they are all separate and
independent network. The advice is that you use all your credits before you
port. On the issue of bill, we said that porting is free to the consumer, but
you will understand that it takes a lot to set up clearing house, the NCC is
not financing that, so the clearing house has recoup its investment from
charges.
Are there sanctions for operators
who refuse to port a customer on their network?
It will be impossible for NCC to
take note of all these, but NCC is a regulator if it can be shown that somebody
pays to migrate, then NCC has the power to invoke very serious penalty on such
person.
It is something we do not expect
but if it occurs our regulations and our act give us the power to actually
impose fines for any violations.
It does not have to be in our MNP
regulation; we can always make a new rule and punish the person that is
involved to serve a great penalty. So we are not afraid of that.
Nigeria and implementation of 4G
and 5G networks:
The United Kingdom (UK) is not
even on Fourth Generation (4G), Fifth Generation (5G) is in a planning stage.
And International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is not even talking about 5G.
we are a very serious member of ITU; they are not even talking about 5G.
everybody is making arrangement in 4G as we are making in Nigeria. We are about
to auction some 4G frequency and as I have told you, we are upgrading people
that are at 800MHz band to Long Term Evolution (LTE) because LTE is 4G. We are
also getting ready to auction the remaining of our 2.3GHz frequency as well as
2.6GHz frequency. The problem is that, some of these 4G bands are not in the
custody of NCC, they are in the custody of NBC, but we have agreed primarily
with National Broadcast Commission (NBC) that they will give us these
frequencies by 2015.
I can assure you that a lot of
developed countries won’t be on LTE by that 2015, so we are not delayed and we
are not late. We are just doing things using international standards. UK for
instance, it took her five (5) years of studies to even auction 4G which they
have just done recently about three months ago. So, we are not late. We in
Nigeria here are keeping to our own time table.
NCC has sanctioned operators for
QoS and how subscribers are not getting any compensation. What is NCC doing to
ensure that?
You are aware that we have been
sanctioning the operators because of quality of services. We sanction them
based on our regulation. For example, our regulation does not permit us to give
the money to subscribers because we know that the people expect us to give the
money to subscribers and I can tell you why it is not easy to give the money to
subscribers. One, it will be difficult to know who got it and who did not get
it. The problem that will generate will be higher than the quality of services.
And also, the service providers
will find it easier to give subscribers free airtime of two-three minutes. It
is more painful to them if they pay the amount that they are fined than to give
the subscribers 2-3 minutes of free calls. We also want to do things that can
be audited so that everybody can say they have fulfilled the fine.
What if operators ply pranks in
the name of porting and why did NCC license only one Clearing House for
porting?
If a number is not ported between
48hours it means that the porting has failed and an enquiry has to be made as
to why the porting failed.
We will give regular statistics on
the numbers that have ported every month. The primary vision of Mobile Number
Portability is a centralized database in one place. This database can be
replicated, that is a copy of it can be made somewhere in case of disaster so
the issue of having so many clearing house does not arise because there has to
be one Clearing House with one database.
This database is also replicated
on the side of every service provider. That is how the side of every service
provider keeps records of what has happened. There is one major database a
small database that is constantly updated belonging to service provider. So it
is not only one database, the one primary database and the number of secondary
database that is included and updated by primary database.
We are just starting Mobile Number
Portability, any problem that might come out of it will add to our experiences.
We do not expect much problem. There may be difficult technical issues on say
transfer of information from computer to computer, but we do not expect great
problem that is why we took a lot of time to come out with it.
... Making SENSE of digital revolution!
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