SIM Registration: Atcon, Alton Say ‘No 3rd Party’

Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria (Atcon) and the Association of Licensed Telecommunications Operators of Nigeria (Alton) have said that third parties should not be allowed in the proposed SIM card registration process.
A third party is someone (or company) other than the principals (telecom companies) directly involved in a transaction or agreement.
Dr Emmanuel Ekuwem, Atcon president, said that “Atcon made it clear that operators should be allowed to register their subscribers’ SIM cards themselves. When you want to open a bank account, the bank marketers come to you to do the marketing, they give you all the forms to fill and open the account for you. There is no third party that is working for the bank.”
Also nodding in agreement, Engineer Gbenga Adebayo, Alton president explained that the process must be transparent as much as possible, it must be friendly, and it must be seamless and flexible. “Operators we expect should be allowed as a first option to register their own subscribers. As a second option and for reasons of convenience, people should have the option of going to nominated centres to register.”
Nigeria CommunicationsWeek gathered that in preparation for the take off of the exercise, telcos have started to recruit temporary staff from different regions of the country to register subscribers.
Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), telecoms regulator, had in February moved the deadline for SIM card registration from March 1 to May 1 giving mobile time to prepare for a government-imposed programme to register new SIM cards issued to mobile-phone users.
NCC said the postponement became necessary following the discovery that large quantities of SIM cards with instant activation features, which were already distributed by the service providers before the earlier announcement, would not have been cleared out before March 1.
The law requires mobile-phone subscribers to provide details such as fingerprints and photographs of themselves.