As the deadline for Rica Sim card registration passed at midnight on Thursday, mobile operators Cell C, MTN and Vodacom reported that they were satisfied with the progress, and reminded customers that getting reconnected was still possible.

Vodacom locked “just under a million” Sim cards after the deadline, it said on Friday. MTN could not report the figures because it was in a closed period, but said that initial indications were that the figure was not significant.

Cell C reported that 97% of its customer base had registered before the deadline. CEO Lars Reichelt said that about 0.01% of contract customers and 3% of prepaid customers did not register their Sim cards by the deadline.

Cell C also welcomed new customers subscribed to other operators that may have been cut off after the deadline, and offered them airtime incentives. The operator also announced a one-week recharge bonus for existing prepaid customers.

The operators said that customers who had not registered in time could still do so at any approved outlets or Rica stations.

“We have over 170 000 Rica agents across South Africa who are available to assist cut-off customers. The only thing to note is that reactivation can take around 24 hours so there may be some inconvenience,” said Vodacom chief officer: corporate affairs Portia Maurice.

MTN also noted that some non-registered subscribers that were disconnected might be experiencing delays in being reconnected after they had registered.

“Our system cannot reconnect all the customers in one go, these subscribers are being reconnected in batches. We wish to appeal to our customers who have Rica’d but have not been connected to exercise patience,” added MTN South Africa customer relationship executive Eddie Moyce.

Contract customers who had not registered would still remain liable to pay their contract, even if the Sim was locked. Pre-paid customers that did not register after six months would have their Sims permanently disconnected and their number recycled into the system, as was common practice in the industry, added Vodacom.

Vodacom would keep registration centres at schools, townships and taxi ranks open until July 4.

Vodacom experienced major network problems on June 30 prior to the Rica cut-off, however, these problems were not associated with the Sim registration process. The cause of the outage, which affected subscribers in selected spots across the country, was a multiple failure of transmission system equipment.

This transmission system provides the connectivity to support the wireless network. The transmission failure, which occurred on Thursday morning, had a knock-on effect on other areas of the network. This resulted in an overall degradation of service.

Rica – the Regulation of Interception of Communications Act – requires all Sim cards to be registered. The process was expected to eliminate criminal elements buying Sim cards easily and discarding them when no longer needed. It gave law enforcement agencies access to certain information, however, operators emphasised that the information on their databases was heavily secured and privacy was guaranteed.
It was an offence to share these details with anyone other than law enforcement agencies.