Some Ghanaians are experiencing telecoms network challenges, including a false feedback that they need to link their SIM cards to their Ghana Cards again. Some are also unable to make calls or access any service on their phones.
Techfocus24 can confirm that those challenges are because there is an ongoing SIM register synchronization between the telcos and National Communications Authority (NCA) and that accounts for that.
Highly reliable sources involved in the process told Techfocus24 “We’re verifying the data in our SIM registration systems against the NCA database. Due to synchronisation issues, sometimes the two databases are out of alignment hence the need to reconcile.
”We’ve provided a dump of our database to the NCA and after synchronising, we’ll clean up the inconsistencies. That will fix many of these problems.”
According to the source, until that process is done, the challenges will not go away immediately, adding however that it is likely to be resolved before the end of month.
Meanwhile, a customer of one of the telcos was on Facebook complaining about facing those challenges and being unable to reach the telco’s customer service persons via the universal 100 customer services short code.
The source said the telcos are working feverishly to resolve the problem as quickly as possible, but if any customer is desperate, they can visit a retail shop of any of the telcos to see if things can be accelerated.
It would be recalled that there have been reports of fraudulent SIM registration, where some telco agents linked several SIM cards to people’s Ghana cards without the consent of the Ghana card owners.
As a result, the NCA has been compelled to eliminate the Stage 1 of SIM registration, where individuals link their own SIM cards to their Ghana Cards and get a unique confirmation code from National Identification Authority indicating ownership. The NCA said the unscrupulous agents take advantage of that unique confirmation code to abuse the process.
The agents and the telcos also abused a special regime that allowed them to use feature phones to register and activate new SIM using the old registration system, on condition that those new SIM will then go on and get proper registered under the new regime. So the NCA has suspended that process as well.
Now the NCA is gearing up to deactivate some 11 million SIM cards including fraudulently registered SIM cards and those which have not registered at all. Ahead of that deactivation, the stakeholders have had to do a synchronization and reconciliation of SIM registers to properly identify good SIM from bad ones.
The industry source is confident that by close of the month all the emerging issues from the synchronization and reconciliation process will go away.
Meanwhile, the Network of Communication Reporters has asked NCA to completely exclude all telco agents from the ongoing SIM registration process to prevent any more breaches.
