Millions of mobile phone subscribers face mass disconnections as the Communication Authority (CA) deadline for registering their SIM cards approaches next week.
According to official data, 15 million mobile subscribers had not registered their SIM cards by August 30, several weeks before the October 15 deadline.
According to the data, 80.7 percent of Safaricom’s 42.53 million subscribers had registered their SIM cards by the end of August, with 8.2 million still waiting.
With 17.04 million subscribers, Airtel Kenya was still waiting for 4.65 million customers to register their lines, with 72.7 percent having done so.
Meanwhile, Telkom Kenya had the lowest SIM card registration ratio of the three major telcos as of August 30, with data showing that it had only registered 36.3 percent (1.24 million) of its 3.42 million subscribers by the end of August.
According to CA, Kenya has 64.67 million SIM subscriptions. These low registration rates occur despite telcos’ ongoing reminders to subscribers to comply or risk being disconnected.
This comes less than two weeks before the firms’ registration expires on October 15, as mandated by the CA.
“Your line is not registered and will be disconnected by October 15,” Safaricom said in text messages to its unregistered clients.
CA extended the deadline for SIM card registration by six months in April to allow millions of users to comply with its directive to weed out fraudsters and other criminals from telco subscriber databases.
The regulator had set an April 15 deadline for the exercise, which was delayed due to a low volume of Kenyans showing up to register their details initially, before long queues closer to the deadline forced CA to extend the registration.
According to the CA, the SIM registration drive has already resulted in the deactivation of 200,000 SIM cards that were registered using incorrect identification details.
Furthermore, CA has proposed new regulations requiring subscribers to surrender biometric data such as fingerprints and facial features that aid in identification during SIM card registration.
The CA is considering creating a database that will serve as a one-stop shop for individual and corporate mobile phone records for ease of verification and retrieval.
The database will contain information about SIM card subscribers and will be linked to government databases such as the Registrar of Companies and the database of deceased people.
The move aims to weed out mobile phone fraudsters while also preventing the use of registered SIM cards belonging to deceased people for fraudulent purposes.
