The Afghanistan Telecom Regulatory Authority (ATRA) on Saturday announced seizing 200,000 unregistered SIM cards and fining telecom companies 250 million afghanis for the violation.
Mohammad Najib Azizi, ATRA head, told a press conference here that telecom companies’ activities and distribution of SIM cards had been under serious assessment across the country over the past two months.
He said 200,000 unregistered SIM cards were collected and their sellers would be identified and taken to justice.
“Electronic Tazkira (e-ID) card is essential for registering a SIM card because paper ID cards can be easily forged”, he said.
“We cannot claim full precision in SIM cards registration until E-Tazkiras are distributed to all people,” Azizi added.
He said dialing 999 and 998 hotlines for registering telecom related problems would be free of cost while the number of free contacts to a telecom companies for help was increased from three to five minutes each week.
Aziz said the internet prices would also fall after the current packages of consumers ended (April 21). In the past, each MB of mobile internet would cost 10 afghanis but it now its price had been reduced to one afghani based on Pay As You Go system, he added.
He said telecom companies were made responsible to explain packages activation and deactivation to consumers and the costs of their packages would be sent through SMS to users each month. Companies have no right to activate packages without the request of the user.
Telecom companies have promised to invest more on improving their services and frequencies for delivering 3G and 4G services during the ongoing solar year, Azizi said.
Pointing to people’s complaints about poor telecom services on social media, he said they could not respond to any complaints made on the internet.
Mobile phone users having been campaigning on social media under slogan ‘Where is ATRA?’ since a month and have accused ATRA of negligence with regard to telecom services’ improvement.
Naqibullah Silab, deputy ATRA head, said that telecom companies were fined for violation of their rules. “Telecom companies have been fined 250 million afghanis for their violations during the past three years,” he said.
