Parliament confident ICH will stop revenue leakage
The Parliamentary Select Committee on Communications has expressed confidence in the ability of the National Interconnect Clearinghouse (ICH) to stop the revenue leakages in the telecom industry.
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The Chairman of the committee, Mr Albert Abongo, told journalists after a meeting with officials of Afriwave and the National Communications Authority (NCA) at the Kofi Annan ICT Centre in Accra at the weekend that members were impressed with the detailed explanation about the work of the ICH, particularly its focus on sealing the revenue leakages within the industry and securing revenue for the state.
A release from the company further quoted the chairman of the select committee as saying that "From what we have seen and heard so far we believe the ICH will seal the revenue leakages in the system but we hope it will rise to the occasion when perpetrators of the leakages get sophisticated."
It said the system had been set up to do a number of things, including real time verification of all interconnect traffic as well as traffic coming into this country from outside to ensure that the government got its proper share of the revenue accruing.
Part of the core work of the ICH, the release said, would also be to fight SIMBOX fraud in a more robust and aggressive way. The committee later visited the ICH installation to acquaint itself with the systems.
The ICH was set up by Afriwave Telecoms Ghana, after it had been given a provisional licence from the National Communications Authority (NCA) earlier this year after Afriwave won a competitive bid to implement the national ICH policy.
Earlier, the Chief Executive Officer of Afriwave, Mr Philip Sowah, told the MPs that phase one of the ICH had been fully set up in Accra and was ready to start work by last Friday.
He explained that phase one comprised the installation and deployment of the core network and transmission infrastructure in the city of Accra, specifically in a rented space at the National Data Centre.
Court case
Meanwhile, there is a pending court case that prevents the ICH from starting operations, but Mr Sowah said "we are only waiting for the green light from the regulator; once we get that we do not even need telcos to connect to our system, we will start work."
There are several other deliverables expected from the ICH and Mr Sowah said they would all be tackled in subsequent phases. He said ICH would make interconnect architecture between telcos less cumbersome, more efficient and cost effective and also make room for new entrants into the telecom space to interconnect with existing players.
SIMBOX Fraud
Mr Sowah said ICH would also implement more robust and aggressive three-step approach to fighting SIMBOX fraud. The three steps, he said, were the test call solution, CDR profiling and localisation.
He explained that currently all the telcos combined make a total of 120,000 calls from abroad a month to enable them to identify SIMBOX numbers and block them, but ICH would for starters make 400,000 calls a month from abroad and that will help to identify more fraud SIMs and deactivate them.
"We are working with the best anti-SIMBOX fraud company in the world, Meucci, to generate these calls from abroad and we terminate them here to identify bad SIMs and report to the respective telcos to deactivate," he said.