South Africa’s mobile operators want tougher Sim registration, but not on the terms communications regulator Icasa has proposed.
Draft amendments to Icasa’s numbering plan regulations, published for comment last month, would require a fingerprint or face check against home affairs records for every new Sim, reactivation and Sim swap. Subscribers would be capped at five numbers per operator, and operators would have two years to re-verify existing customers.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show, Nomvuyiso Batyi, CEO of the Association of Comms & Technology (ACT), tells Duncan McLeod why the industry body won’t support the rules as drafted. ACT, which represents Vodacom, MTN, Telkom, Cell C, Rain and Liquid Intelligent Technologies, has spent two years working with the justice department on amendments to Rica, the Sim registration law, and its members agreed an industry framework in June.
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Batyi says Icasa officials sat in meetings where that work was presented, so the draft came as a surprise. The industry framework would allow 20 Sims per person per network rather than five. It also targets informal dealers who sell Sims pre-registered in their own names.
Batyi explains why prepaid customers are the hard part – some traders in rural areas still register Sims over 2G connections – and what it will cost to query the home affairs database. She warns that forcing every subscriber to re-verify risks repeating the failures of digital migration, and describes the fraud driving the debate, from WhatsApp scams and stolen phones to one-time Pin fraud.
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