The Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) players in the country were only allowed to start SIM registration a few days ago due to technical challenges in getting them started with the telcos in October 2021.
The BWAs comprise of Surfline, Broadband Home, Busy Ghana and Telesol, who were prevented by the National Communications Authority (NCA) from starting SIM registration on October 1, 2021 with the telcos.
When the exercise started in October last year, the BWAs were asked by NCA to wait, as the focus was on the telcos who had large numbers.
But they later learnt that the directive had to do mainly with technical issues and integration unto National Identification Authority’s platforms among other things. As a result, they only started work on integration sometime at beginning of the second quarter of this year and that also had several challenges with the central party.
Everything was cleared for them to commence registration on July 21, 2022 (nine days ago), but they had to do their own test runs to ensure the system works, so they started actual registration just a few days ago.
So the BWAs, which have a total of less than 50,000 customers, have also been given extension to complete their SIM Registration.
Unique Challenges
Unlike the telcos, which empowered their customers to capture their Ghana Card details via an SMS short code *404#, the BWAs are strictly internet service providers (ISPs) so their customers could not do a remote capture of their Ghana Card details.
So, with the BWAs, customers would have to go to their respective registration centers for both the Ghana Card details and biodata to be captured and that will take a bit of time than it is with the telcos.
Information reaching Techgh24 indicate they asked for three months extension but they are likely to get one month extension to do so.
Surfline has a little over 38,700 customers, followed by Busy Ghana with 4,500 plus, Telesol with 3,000 and then Broadband Home with a a meagre 770 customers.
Meanwhile, the Minister of Communications and Digitalization will soon be announcing a general conditional extension of the entire SIM registration exercise today.
