The world of telecommu – nications, especially mobile communications, continues to evolve with innovative technologies and high-speed data services. This has a significant impact on the development of many sectors of the economy including hospitality and tourism, trade, logistics, finance, and many others.
On the other hand, as the technology continues to advance, few opt to abuse and illegally use it for their own narrow interests. That is why telecom companies are exerting great efforts in controlling industry intruders who are engaged in telecom fraud using infrastructures built by taxpayers’ money.
Telecom fraud is conducted in secret and it is difficult to control. For long, concerned Ethiopian authorities have been trying to come up with various solutions and interventions to arrest it but they were not successful.
At this time, Ethio-telecom is the only company that provides telecom services in Ethiopia. In a country of more than 100 million, Ethio-telecom has secured over 43 million subscribers.
In the past couple of years, the company in collaboration with pertinent stakeholders has been taking various actions to control telecom fraud/grey telecom market. The consorted activities are now bearing fruits and improving the company’s competency and financial gains, said Ethio-telecom CEO Firehiwot Tamiru during a recent press briefing.
She also added that in previous times, grey market and telecom fraud have put Ethio-telecom at risk. Though the challenges and the resulting risk were understood beforehand, it was not managed to come up with solutions because of the lack of coordination among stakeholders and the leadership. As a result, the company has not been able to create a better business environment to ensure win-win business relations with and long-lasting engagements of partners and stakeholders.
After assessing the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, the company has now come up with various reform interventions.
The interventions aim at equipping the leadership and management with up-to-date knowledge about recent trends in the telecom industry and the market structure. They also aim at nurturing competitive mindset, discipline and business orientation among the leadership and management, she said.
The CEO confirmed that radical tariff discounts ranging from 40 -50 percent have been made in all products and services with the objective of ensuring affordability and enhancing service usage and customer satisfaction. With this discount, traffic has increased in a remarkable rate of 130 percent in data usage and 19 percent in voice call services.
Furthermore, due to various business and technical interventions, international incoming traffic has increased by more than 50 percent which was declining consistently in the previous years. It is worth mentioning that the increased traffic has been accommodated with the existing resource with minimal additional investment, optimization, and resource reshuffling, relocation and parameter adjustment, Firehiwot added.
Ethio-telecom International Business Chief Officer Seid Aragaw also said that the company has adopted commercial and technical approaches to deal with telecom fraud.
“We spotted a number of Ethiopians who reside in foreign lands started to use the respective countries’ telecom services,” he said adding, “Through negotiations and by building an air traffic route from South Africa, Dubai, USA, and Saudi Arabia, we have enabled them to use Ethiopian route. As a result, traffic has shown a dramatic increase.”
International incoming traffic has increased from 4.4 million to 12 million. The company has also held negotiation with neighboring countries so that they use Ethio-telecoms infrastructure with a reasonable discount. This has encouraged users to prefer Ethio-telecom.
From the technical point of view, critical interventions have been conducted in various parts of the country to control and take legal actions against individuals who take part in telecom fraud.
According to him, SIM Box basically changes international traffic into local ones and at the destination networks, the fraudster pay only local charges. The calling person is paying the international call rates for connecting calls but carriers and destination operator will not able to collect the international call carrier charges and call transfer charges.
Fraudsters make money using route calls illegally and earn the benefit of international carriers and transfer charges. But in the end, they only pay local transfer charges. But currently, the technical interventions have significantly reduced these kinds of telecom fraud.
The Ethiopian Herald August 21, 2019
BY MENGISTEAB TESHOME
