People
making calls. Mobile phone users who give false information when
registering their Sim cards will be fined Sh100,000 or be jailed for six
months in new regulations to curb phone crimes. Photo/FILE 
Mobile
phone users who give false information when registering their Sim cards
will be fined Sh100,000 or be jailed for six months in new regulations
to curb phone crimes.
Contravening the new rules will
lead to a fine not exceeding Sh5 million for mobile phone companies
while agents committing offences under the regulations, will be fined
Sh500,000 or a jail term of up to one year.
Persons committing other offences under the regulations will face a fine of Sh300,000.
The new rules are awaiting gazettement before they come into force.
“We
have enhanced the penalties to ensure that everyone, right from the
mobile firms to the agent and the subscriber, is accountable,” Mr
Francis Wangusi, the director-general of the Communications Authority of
Kenya said Tuesday.
The rules are designed to seal
loopholes in the existing law and were endorsed by key players in the
telecommunications sector. They are in line with provisions in the
recently enacted Kenya Information Communication Act, 2013.
Once
they come into force, they will override the January 2013 regulations
which imposed a fine of Sh300,000 or a jail term of three years to
telecom firms failing to comply with the law on registration of Sim
cards.
The regulator has also enhanced rules on
registering Sim cards by minors. For anyone below the age of 18 to get a
mobile telephone line, one has to be accompanied by a legal guardian
and produce a valid birth certificate.
However, their
legal guardians will remain liable for all activities carried out using
the Sim cards. Upon reaching the age of majority, the teenagers will
assume full responsibility for the lines.
“…a licensee
shall advise a minor registered as a user under this regulation to
register his or her personal identification details according to
regulation 5 and 6 within a period of ninety days of attainment of the
age of majority,” the rules read in part.
Companies
registering Sim cards will now be required to provide identification
details for at least one director in addition to the certificate of
incorporation or registration.
The length of time that
mobile operators are required to archive the bio-data of subscribers
after the deactivation of a Sim card has been increased from one to two
years. Sale of phone lines has also been restricted to mobile phone
firms and their licensed agents while all pre-activated lines have been
banned.
After several false starts since 2009, the
government launched the campaign to deactivate unregistered lines in
earnest last year in a campaign to combat crimes perpetrated by
anonymous subscribers.
Mr Wangusi, however, acknowledged that some line owners remain unaccounted for due to “technical hitches”.
“We would not say that we are 100 per cent foolproof that everyone is registered,” he said.
In
the wake of the Westgate terror attack last September 21, the
government clamped down on mobile firms and their agents, arresting
individuals across the country, who had been caught selling
pre-activated Sim cards amid claims that unregistered Sim cards were
used by criminals during the terror attack.
REGIONAL SECURITY
In
a December meeting in Nairobi, communication sector ministers from
Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and South Sudan agreed to establish a cross-border
Sim card registration framework in order to combat crime.
Unregistered lines roaming in East Africa, the ministers said, were to be treated as a regional security issue.
The
implementation of these new regulations comes within the wider context
of reforms that the communications authority is implementing in the
telecoms sector.
Before the end of this year, the
authority will put in place new standards for assessing the quality of
service offered by mobile phone companies and data service providers.
Currently, it assesses firms on the basis of eight key performance
indicators ranging from speech quality to the number of dropped calls.
Mr Wangusi said a consultant had been contracted to help the government expand the indicators to SMS and data services.
The
authority also plans to outsource the job of assessing the quality of
service to a third party to “infuse efficiency” in the process.
“Because
of the segmentation in the industry, we want to ensure continuous
monitoring and we are in the process of hiring contractors to be able to
do that,” said Mr Wangusi.
QUALITY OF SERVICE
This
comes in the wake of row between the regulator and one of the
operators, Safaricom, over last year’s quality of service assessment.
The
government’s analysis indicated that the operator had failed to meet
minimum standards, a position that saw Safaricom question the
methodology used in the assessment.
Quality of service is tied to the renewal of licences issued to telecom operators and Safaricom’s is set to expire this year.
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