Posted by: Aamir Attaa on October 22, 2008 at 1:11 PM
We had informed our readers about the removal of pre-activated SIMs from market, to cap sale of illegal SIMs in early September, and then there were reports that a policy is being made to execute the idea.
Now there is news that Pakistan Telecommunication Authority has given out a date and has decided to implement a system for activation of new mobile SIMs after verification of customers’ starting from January 31, 2009.
Decision was taken unanimously in a meeting of mobile companies’ CEOs and the regulatory affairs officials that was chaired by chairman PTA and attended by senior PTA officials.
Chairman PTA decided that from January 31, 2009 onwards non-active mobile SIMs will be sold which will be activated only after the verification of consumer data from NADRA, subsequently sale of pre-activated SIMs would be stopped. Furthermore, 10 mobile connections could be issued at most on one CNIC.
“PTA would conduct a survey to check violation of SOP after two weeks. If any violation would be observed the authority would issue show cause notice and impose fines on the mobile companies”, Said Chairman PTA
It was also decided that PTA and Mobile operators will run media campaigns to educate the subscribers to have SIMs registered in their names.
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Posted by: Aamir Attaa on October 17, 2008 at 9:23 AM
Now you can win 800 CC cars, Motorbikes, LCD TV, Mobile phones and cash prizes by just registering your SIM. Additionally you can get Rs. 50 free balance as soon as your SIM gets registered - Moreover, if you fail to register your SIM by March 31, 2009 then your SIM will be blocked for ever.
Unfortunately, this is not true… but this is something PTA should advise cellular companies to carry away such country wide campaigns, with some incentive for customers to actually pull them to register their SIMs, and at the same time a threat that they will actually block your SIM by a certain date, if not registered.
We all know very well that there is no solution to illegal SIMs, but to re-register each number, and block the rest. This will save us from lots us troubles and a chance to determine our telecom policy effectively, as the actual stats will become public.
Despite, 10.5 million SIMs got blocked, and more to be added in blocked list (maybe in millions), there will still remain many un-registered SIMs, or those SIMs which are registered but are not with their actual owners.
In fact, PTA should spare some funds to join hands with cellular companies in such offerings, after all they are earning good amount of money, and PTA is equally responsible for the situation along with cellular companies.
You may like reading this post on same topic as well - Is NADRA capable of Verifying 90 Million SIMs?
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Posted by: Aamir Attaa on September 25, 2008 at 6:01 PM
Senate’s standing committee on Interior has passed directives to Pakistan Telecommunication Authority and Ministry of IT and Telecom to finalize policy for taking away pre-active SIMs from the market, with-in two weeks.
A source familiar with the directives issued by Senate’s standing committee told that Government is very serious to tackle illegal SIM’s issue, especially after Marriott’s incident; Government is in no mood to leave any stone un-turned in order to make the country free of illegal SIMs.
Seriousness of Chairman Senate Standing Committee on Interior Talha Mehmood can be judged by his statement that he gave during today’s meeting, he said, “We are in state of War…” He said that PTA must come up with policy with in two weeks, so that all pre-active SIMs could be taken away from market at earliest. Senator Talha, linked various criminal activities with illegal SIMs, and he once again emphasized the need to taking severe actions against those who carry illegal SIMs.
Further reading on Illegal SIMs …
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Posted by: Aamir Attaa on September 3, 2008 at 9:30 AM
A month ago or so Interior Ministry of Pakistan came up with a solution to curb illegal sale of SIMs by directing cellular companies to send SIMs directly to postal addresses instead of directly selling them at franchises or other outlets.
This was an extreme action that could be taken, and apparently cellular companies succeeded in not implementing the practice. But now, there comes another directive to stop selling pre-activated SIMs, and this time Senate’s Standing Committee on Interior has passed these directions to PTA to be implemented with immediate effect.
Business Recorder has reported on this and says that standing committee had a meeting with Chairman PTA, Chairman Nadra, Ministry of Information Technology and conclusively directives were passed to PTA to ensure the end of sale of pre-activated SIMs within four weeks.
So now expect deactivated SIMs from stores when you buy them, and you will have to activate SIMs by providing your verification and providing a secret code. Cellular companies are yet to reach a point to follow the practice.
So this was about this particular development that took place. Now let’s discuss current situation of illegal SIMs.
I have previously written about the illegal sale of SIMs and measures taken by the government and cellular companies to resolve the issue. But seems like we are in middle of no where… you would be wondering why I said so? Okay read on to know this
It has been told to media that cellular companies have blocked around 7.1 million unregistered and unauthorized SIM cards of different Cellular-phone Companies issued till April 31, 2008, besides thousands have been verified and registered.
Out of these 7.1 million blocked SIMs, a victim was one of my friends who had been using his SIM for almost three years. He believed that SIM was registered in his name, and there was no good reason for blocking it. Anyhow, he can get a new SIM, not a big deal, but when he called his bank to activate his credit card for shopping online, (you may know that normally credit cards are not allowed to be used online, banks activate this service on request) they asked him to call from the number that was associated with credit card , or they will not activate him the service.
He even spoke to their TL (Team Lead), and told them that his registered number has been blocked and he can not call them from that particular number, but his pleas were put over deaf ears… and the response was “Sir, this is part of our policy, and we can not help you even our bank president asks us to do so”
This is one known complexity out of many unknown, if we kept on blocking these SIMs. I windup my post here, leaving a question open… that is “Is there any Ideal Solution for the situation created other than re-registering all numbers??? “
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Posted by: Aamir Attaa on August 7, 2008 at 10:19 AM
A dispute between NADRA and Cellular Companies is going to collapse online SIM verification system that was started just a week ago, reported Daily Jang. This online verification of NIC was granted to franchisers who could check the legitimacy of any National Identity Card in real time using NADRA’s central database system through fiber optic cable. In this regards franchisers were especially trained to use NADRA’s database.
Mr. Ibrar Mustafa of Daily Jang, in his report says that the dispute is primarily over the operating expenses of this system. We learned that earlier cellular companies and NADRA had agreed with Rs. 5 per NIC verification; however, now NADRA has hiked these prices by almost 700 percent; thus per verification may cost Rs. 35 to cellular companies.
Currently, cellular companies have stopped verifying NIC with NADRA’s database until the dispute is not resolved.
Seems we are in middle of nowhere! Let’s hope things go fine and there is some positive ending of this dispute. By the way, I have already questioned about NADRA’s capabilities of verifying 90 Million SIMs, in which I had come up with couple of suggestions through which we can achieve the target of 100 percent verified SIMs.
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Posted by: Aamir Attaa on July 29, 2008 at 11:22 PM
Latest stats given so far by Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (as per end of July 2008) and those which are advertised through media campaigns by Cellular companies say that there are 90 million SIMs in the country.
We all know that NADRA is given the responsibility to verify each SIM of Pakistan, which in opinion of many telecom analysts is not capable of doing so.
Reasons:6
- NADRA itself has only 60 millions of registered users in its database (As of July 2008)
- Cellular SIMs’ sale started way before NADRA came into existence
- First few years of NADRA were a total failure (because they have reached this 60 million registered ID card figure now, it was defiantly not so in earlier years) but SIMs were being sold even then
So there are two possibilities now
- Situation 1: Either there are not more than 60 million customers in Pakistan (or even less, due to the fact that many of NADRA ID card holders, especially women and those in far flung areas don’t own mobile phones yet)
- Situation 2: Or NADRA can not verify all SIMs
Okay, now we have reached 2 possible situation here, let’s discuss both in detail and what steps should be taken in case of both situations.
I am assuming that Cellular Companies and the regulator (PTA) are familiar with the actual situation, that is either we have only 60 million or less customers or NADRA can’t verify SIMS.
Situation 1: Pakistan has less than 60 million Customers
This is relatively a bad news for telecom sector of Pakistan, in terms of investment and the tempo that the industry has achieved. Let’s check out why Telcos keep on insisting that they have subscriber’s strength that they never bear
- To increase their stock value
- To Minimize ARPU, that’s called Average Revenue per User. (Higher ARPU is always welcomed, but in case of Pakistan, cellular companies have (maybe) tried to keep the ARPU low. It is like this, if you are earning lot of revenue but you show higher expenses (more subscribers, more operating expenses) to neutralize your revenues (low ARPU) and eventually escaping taxes
- And not an important point, but it comes into consideration while keeping in view the performance of individual managers who kept their bosses (investors) happy
Resolution of Situation 1
In case, situation 1 is true, then Pakistan Telecommunication Authority must come into act and play positively so that Cellular companies are not able to steal taxes and help our economy grow, as this is the only sector that can make some big money for our country.
In case situation 1 is true then we may expect new figures in Telco ads such as Call Rs 1 per Minute to 18 million Mobilink friends and family numbers etc.
Situation 2: NADRA is not capable of verifying SIMs
In case, situation 2 is true, then we must not wait any more and we must come up with a better and immediate solution than of what we are practicing now. Stop the current process of SIM verification from NARDA and stop wasting time.
What option we are left if Situation 2 is true?
Alas we have not many options in order to tackle situation 2, but only one that is to re-register each single SIM. There should be given a deadline of like 6 or 9 months, during which each cellular subscriber will have to re-register his/her SIM before deadline. And remaining all numbers should be blocked after this ONE DEADLINE.
I am not kidding, this was done in Bangladesh and they have managed to re-register almost all of their cellular customers. This is even better options for cellular companies to reduce their verification cost (Cellular companies used to pay Rs. 20 earlier on and now Rs. 5 for verification of each SIM)
What if both Situations are true?
Then it’s the worst situation (and there are good possibilities of this) that we have got it, we may need to cater for each situation equally and separately
Conclusion
Most of the people (from PTA, cellular companies, financial experts, and Telecom analysts) I spoke with for the preparation of this report were well aware of the fact that the current mechanism for SIM verification is not going to work.
So who is going to prove that millions of SIMs (8 million that’s what Mr. Talha claims) were really blocked? or they are the only un-registered SIMs? I have spoken to CSRs of Mobilink, Ufone and Telenor and they say they never came across any customer who said that his/her SIM was blocked. So there are good chances that cellular companies blocked already inactive numbers. We all know that cellular companies have not provided the details of 5.4 blocked SIMs (which were blocked couple of months ago).
Dr. Yaseen, our newly appointed Chairman PTA should put more pressure on Telecom companies for more transprancy.
Whatever the case is, we must debug this issue now. As situation is still not out of our hands, and we must pay proper attention in order to leave hassle free environment to our coming generations.
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Posted by: Aamir Attaa on July 22, 2008 at 2:15 PM
Interior Ministry Comes up With Remedy of Pakistani Mobile Users
Federal Government of Pakistan (Interior Ministry) thinks that PTA and cellular companies operating here in the Pakistan have badly failed to cap illegal sale of mobile SIMs. Consequently, it has decided that no one can purchase and get SIM in real time from franchises; instead, if a user needs to buy a SIM, he must fill all required documents, with NIC copy and other prerequisites. Latter on, cellular company will send him SIM at his postal address.
Daily times has reported in its July 22, 2008 edition as following
The federal government has decided that Mobile SIMs will now be posted to the addresses given by applicants and not handed over to the purchaser on the spot. An Interior Ministry spokesman told reporters that any violation of this procedure shall be punishable under the relevant laws and necessary instructions had been issued to Chairman PTA in this regard.
This is a very sharp step taken by government. Maybe it was only solution left with the government; given that PTA and cellular companies were not showing good results regarding the sale of illegal SIMs.
I think that this method may delay the process of SIM activation and may result into problems for users, but the legislation may lead us to a safer Pakistan. We must remember that this situation is reversal of what we were 8/10 years ago when we used to wait for a PTCL line for months. So these delays are due to problems created by ourselve.
On other hands, sales of cellular connections may further go down, which are already witnessing a decline in recent months. Even bangladesh defeated us in Cellular SIM’s sale in June 2008. It merits mentioning that Pakistan added
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Posted by: Aamir Attaa on May 21, 2008 at 6:25 PM
Earlier this month, Senate’s standing committee on Telecom Affairs had asked Pakistan Telecommunication Authority to block all unregistered SIMs by May 22, 2008. However, with only one day left…PTA has managed to block only 1.4 million unregistered SIMs.
Reported here, Daily time quotes Khurram Mehran, Public Relations Deputy Director PTA, that the deadline was not set on practical grounds and Standing Committee did not consult PTA before setting this deadline. ‘Daily Times’ says that the deadline for blocking all un-registered SIMs is likely to be not met by PTA and cellular companies of Pakistan.
Years back, Pakistan Telecommunication Authority was warned by many sources, including press reports, regarding the rising issue of un-registered SIMs, but authority did not take any action against cellular companies. On other hands, seems like cellular companies of Pakistan were in race of adding maximum number of cellular subscribers, without fearing the data and ownership of mobile connections sold.
The race for registering customers began when the activation tax per SIM was lowered to Rs. 500, which was as much as Rs. 3,000 before. Cellular companies opted to give almost Rs. 400 per SIM to government but they never stopped in selling the illegal and mostly in-active SIMs.
This actually helped companies in raising their stock values, for example, Mobilink the subsidiary of Orascom could have different stock value if there customers were 15 million, which are now reported as 31 million. We saw the substantial rise in value of Warid Telecom, which sold its 30 percent shares to Singtel for US 758 Million dollars.
PTA, allegedly, had understanding with cellular companies for allowing them to sell SIMs without any procedures; un-confirmed sources have said that PTA was in an un-disclosed deal with telco operators. That is why cellular companies are now looking at PTA to protect them from blocking their millions of SIMs.
Key problems
- Telecom officials say that complete documentation is not possible
- Blocking millions of SIMs will ruin the stock value of cellular companies
- Blocking SIMs may also hit some genuine customers, who had followed the documentation process for registering their SIM but franchisers’ didn’t registered them due to sale pressure exerted by cellular companies
How PTA will cap the Sale of SIMs on such stalls??
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