Subscribers appeal for three-month extension of SIM registration

The National President of The National Association of Telecommunications Subscribers (NATCOMS), Chief DeoluOgunbanjo, has appealed to the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) to grant a three-month extension to the Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) registration exercise in order to allow telecoms subscribers who have been unable to register their cards for several reasons to complete the registration process.

Ogunbanjo said that some subscribershad registered before now by agents, but were having issues with the network operators.

He also noted that some agents did not collect the required full details of subscribers because of their rush to register as many subscribers as possible so as get bigger pay.

Ogunbanjo said, 'In view of the submissions above, a lot of subscribers will be locked out due to no fault of theirs as they think they have registered their SIMs.

'Against the backdrop of the above and in order to ensure that every subscriber is given fair consideration, we are appealing to the NCC to give Nigerian subscribers a three-month one-way final warning extension on SIM registration.'

The NCC had on Tuesday, insisted that the June 30 deadline for SIM registration in the country would not be extended.

The commission reiterated that there would be no excuse for anyone whose SIM was unregistered by that date as all unregistered SIMs would be disconnected.

The Director, Public Affairs, NCC, Mr. Tony Ojobo, confirmed the commission's position to our correspondent, saying, 'There will be no extension for this. SIM registration has been on for two years now. Come June 30, all unregistered SIMs will be disconnected.'

He, however, advised subscribers to make efforts to know what their registration status was if they had any doubts about it.

'Subscribers can send 'REG' to 746 to confirm if their SIMs have been registered or not,' he said.

Another option available to subscribers is to dial *746# for a text message confirming the status of their SIM registration.

According to Ogunbanjo, negligence on the part of some agents taking part in the registration exercise in the country is the reason behind some of the anomalies being recorded in the process, according to the.

As the deadline approaches, some telecoms subscribers who claimed to have registered their SIM cards long before now are still being categorised as unregistered by their network operators.

As of Wednesday (yesterday), subscribers in that category were seen in many call centres in Lagos trying to update their data with their network operators following requests by the operators.

Ogunbanjo said some agents involved in the registration process took some of the steps for granted, and as such, could not achieve successful registration of subscribers that leveraged their platforms.

'This actually caused a lot of mix up,' the NATCOMS boss reiterated.

For those whose data were confirmed to be incomplete by the network operators, he said haphazard approaches by agents in filling subscribers' data were responsible for the problem.

He said, 'For these remaining days, I will advise subscribers who have yet to register their SIMs to go to the customer care centres of their respective operators for registration. This will eliminate cases of incomplete data collection or total omission.

'I must say the Nigeria Communications Commission has given enough chance to subscribers to register their SIMs.'

The stage for the SIM card registration exercise was set in February 2011 when the NCC signed contracts with seven service providers to handle the registration process in different parts of the country along with the telecommunications operators.