What NCC is doing to discourage handsets theft —Wakil

Mr Bako Wakil is the Director of Technical Services of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC). In this interview with InfoTech recently, he spoke about some issues which the Commission is embarking upon to make life easier for subscribers. Excerpts:

WHAT do you think are some of the factors that contribute to poor network services in the country?

Sub-standard telephone sets that have not been type-approved by the Commission may likely cause problem to the networks and also affect the quality of service. That is why we are encouraging everybody to ensure that the telephone handset they are buying is one that has been type-approved by the Commission. And we have a list of all the telephones that we have type-approved on our website and people can look at it. It is not only telephone handsets but every device that is being connected to the national network is actually listed on our website. If a telephone handset is sub-standard, or it is counterfeit, it will not function well and therefore, it will import noise and sometimes you will be blaming the network provider. Solution to this is the use of type-approved telephone devices.

What is the Commission doing to discourage phone theft in the country?

Theft of phones has become very frequent in the country, especially during occasions like wedding, funeral and all those kinds of stuff. We are putting a device management solution that will take care of all sorts. That solution will also take care of theft and substandard handsets. It will also take care of theft of phones. Once a phone is stolen and it is reported, we can blacklist that phone and once it is blacklisted, it will not work on any of the networks no matter the SIM you put in the phone. It will not work. And that will discourage stealing of phones once the solution is in place.

You recently mentioned that a harmonisation of codes by the operators will soon come into play. Can you explain better?

We are trying to harmonise short codes that are being used by the service providers on their networks. For instance, each one of the network providers have different short cut numbers to call when subscribers have problems. Even when you want to top up your credit, you dial certain short cut. Checking of balance is also different for all networks. We want to harmonise that we have one short code across all the networks for loading credit or top up and for checking balance. We are working with the operators right now and we want to give them a timeline like about a year for all of them to work concurrently because we cannot just cut them off like that. It will also be publicised for people to be aware. After that, the old short codes will cease to function. This is just to make life easy for Nigerians.

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