Register or we lock you out - MTN
Godfrey Mutabazi, the UCC executive director, registers his simcard at the start of the exercise in March 2013. PHOTO BY FAISWAL KASIRYE
What you need to know:
Uganda Communications Commissions has warned that it will penalise any telecom that shall fail to disconnect unregistered simcard after November 30. This has created anxiety in the market as the deadline nears. Jonathan Adengo spoke to Brian Gouldie, the MTN chief executive officer, whose company last week cut off about 300,000 client for failing to register.
Do you have any estimates of how many of your customers are not registered?
Our entire customer base is either fully registered or partially registered. The number of unregistered simcards amount to less than 300,000. These have already been deactivated as is required by the law.
What happens to partially registered customers?
Partial registration has been accepted by the regulator. When the deadline for simcard registration was implemented on August 30, 2013, all partially registered simcards were deemed to have complied.
Some of this documentation for partially registered simcards is still being held by agents and retailers but we are in the process of collecting all supporting documents to comply with the law. It can take between three to seven months for the documentation to be collected, depending on location.
Customers activated in this manner are considered to be partially registered until the documents are received at our head offices at the verification centre.
How come it takes this long to get all necessary documentation?
The market has matured and as such penetration levels have also increased. Under such circumstances there has been an increasing number of new activations coming from remote and rural areas. Therefore, logistical challenges for documentation collection have increased as locations become more remote.
Could some of your agents be selling simcards without registering them?
Yes! We are aware that some agents and retailers have not been complying with these requirements. In this case, we have been suspending the offending agents and retailers from doing simcard registration.
Any simcard that has been activated where the registration process has not been complied with will be deactivated.
But the challenge is exception identification is time consuming due to the manual nature of the registration process.
How many simcards have you registered so far?
Our entire customer base is either fully registered or partially registered. The requirement is to ensure that we are in receipt of all specified documentation for customers who are partially registered.
We are currently collecting all documents from collection points around the country to improve the transit process.
Further, there are instances where only one document has been received or where the specified documents do not meet the verification standards implemented by the company.
But we are contacting such customers to ensure that their documents are submitted again to complete the registration.
What plan do you have for customers who have not registered?
We are implementing a very active customer engagement campaign to make all of our customers aware of the requirements to have their simcards registered.
We are also encouraging our customers to do a self-check in order to determine their registration status.
This campaign will deal with general awareness and education as well as directing customers that are required to complete the process by ensuring that their supporting documentation has been properly submitted and is in receipt at the verification centre.
