Impose 45-day porting restriction on new SIM cards, NCC direct MNOs

The Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC) has called on Mobile Number Operators in the country to impose a 45-day porting restriction period on newly activated SIM cards.

This came after the regulator conducted a comprehensive compliance audit on the Mobile Number Portability (MNP) Platform from September 4 to 6, 2019 in Lagos.

Recall that MNP was introduced by the NCC in 2013 to encourage competition and ensure that consumers continue to enjoy quality services on all the mobile networks.

NCC said the audit aimed to examine the level of success of National Porting Clearing house’s migration of the MNP platform to its new technical partners, Porting Access Limited, and conduct an in-depth review of planned or unplanned technical faults that occurred within the period under review.

The commission also called on the Mobile Network Operators to remove the power to carry out ‘Emergency Repatriations’ and ‘Return to Block Operator’ from their front-end agents to mitigate the emerging trend of abuse of laid down processes and procedures.

It said, “The regulator said there was a need for the MNOs to educate and train front-end members of staff to ensure the correct donor networks and the MSISDN were specified before details were sent to the NPC.”

The NCC also urged the operators to strictly comply with the conditions for ‘Emergency Repatriations’ and ‘Return to Block Operator’ in line with the provisions of the MNP business rules, as well as the consequences for non-compliance.

“In view of the relatively low amount of porting transactions, the commission will carry out robust awareness campaigns to enlighten consumers on the availability of Mobile Number Portability Scheme,” the regulator added.