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| Some Students in PNG using the mobile phone services Picture courtesy of .news.pngfacts.com |
By FIDELIS SUKINA
10 million users are not accounted for this was revealed on
Thursday by Chief Executive Officer of National Information and Communications
Technology Authority (NICTA) Charles Punaha.
Papua New Guinea has a population of 7 million plus but the
mobile phone industry has more than 10 million users which are not registered.
Punaha took the opportunity during the launch of the new
cybercrime policy to inform the public as well as mobile phone service
providers on the need to register simcards and mobile phone subscribers..
“Just for your information NICTA also manages and administers
the allocation of numbers that are used by the industry and also fixed service
and mobile service”.
“So far 10 million numbers have been issued to the mobile
service providers 6million to Digicel 2 million to Telikom PNG and 2 million to
Bmobile and I will tell you none of these operators know who this particular
numbers have been issued to and that is the very big problem when it comes to
us in addressing some of the problems we are now experiencing, in terms of
misuse of mobile devices for purposes of committing a crime and purposes of
spreading unsubstantive, unbounded
messages in the network”. Punaha said
He added that Papua New Guinea was one of the countries in
the world that you can buy simcards on the street and that was not acceptable.
He got on the service providers for ignoring the fact that
such a policy to register simcards would come into effect but were lagging
behind to put in measures.
“Unfortunately today you can by Simcards at the Kai Bars and
the street and that should never be happening you (service providers) knew this
policy was coming in you should have put in place processes and mechanisms to
make sure you have some form of registration in place for customers”.
“The issue of registering simcards has been in the public
domain for the last 24 months I am very sorry to say that the operators have
done no effort to put in place processes and procedures to register their
customers”.
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