Jevans Nyabiage

30 August 2010

Nairobi — The extended mobile phone SIM card registration exercise ends on Tuesday against a background of growing uncertainty over whether subscribers who will not have registered will be disconnected.

The Kenyan telecoms market is characteristic of subscribers with multiple lines, meaning that many cards might not be registered.

There is a school of thought that says the exercise has no legal basis, and hence it will be difficult for the industry regulator - the Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK) to disconnect lines that will not have been listed by the close of business on Tuesday.

The market is also undergoing serious realignments, as operators engage in a vicious price wars for the scramble of subscribers.

Initial statistics show that many mobile phone users in Kenya are yet to have their lines registered.

According to Safaricom, by the close of business last week, the firm had registered 13.4 million subscribers.

This is 84 per cent of its 16 million-strong subscriber base and includes M-Pesa and M-Kesho customers.

This number is expected to have materially changed by August 30 as more traffic was expected with users trying to beat the CCK deadline.

Mr Atul Chaturvedi, Essar Telecom Kenya ltd (yu) country manager told the Daily Nation that so far, they have registered about 0.5 million subscribers out of more than 1.5 million, on the Yu network.

By the time of going to press we had not received figures from Zain and Telkom Kenya.

Mr Francis Hook, regional manager IDC East Africa says that in South Africa, it cost Vodacom at least 1 million subscribers - that is, one million casual users were disconnected.

In Kenya, especially thinking of handsets promotions (buy a handset and get a line free plus 100 airtime), there are quite a number of unused lines.

Mr Hook says migratory users who have three lines in their purse/wallet and one in their handset and now compelled to decide who is their "true love" or register all lines - across all networks may result to a loss of at least 2 million subscribers.

This, he says, may end up reducing overall "penetration" considerably, at least by 8-12 per cent.

The government had extended the exercise that was scheduled to end on July 31, due to what Dr Bitange Ndemo, the PS Ministry of Information and Communications termed as 'logistical difficulties'.

As at July 27, in a country with 20.18 million subscribers, a total of 12.42 million subscribers had registered representing 61.6 per cent.

Safaricom, with a subscriber base of 16.24 million, as at July 27, had registered 11.25 million, while Zain with 1.89 clients had recorded 1.03 million.

Telkom Kenya, had by that date, registered 36,907 subscribers out of Telkom's total mobile phone subscriber base of 552,294, a mere 3.98 per cent.

Essar Telkom with 1.49 million subscriber base had registered 110,013 users, which is a 7.3 per cent success.

And on Monday, Kenyans with their peculiar habits of waiting for last minute, flocked registration centres, trying to beat the deadline to have their SIMs registered.

Last year, President Kibaki directed mobile phone operators to register their customers to boost national security and reduce phone related crimes.

These include kidnappings where criminal gangs have in the past asked for ransom money to be paid through mobile money transfer services.