Here’s what to know about revised SIM card policy

Telecommunication operators resumed SIM registration on Monday 19 April as announced by the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy.

The exercise is kicking off with a set of new guidelines that could have implications on how mobile subscribers use their SIM cards.

The federal government had on 9 December suspended the sale of new SIM cards and mandated every Nigerian to link their NIN to their SIMS or face being barred.

The policy features guidelines on new SIM acquisition and activation, SIM replacement, new SIM activation for corporates and Internetof- things ( IOT), machineto-machine (M2M), among others.

The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) is responsible for strict compliance with the revised policy. For individuals and corporates, SIM registration now requires the presentation of the National Identification Number (NIN).

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The requirement is also applicable to SIM replacement. For corporate registration, the policy specifies the appointment of a Telecoms Master (at the minimum of executive management) to provide the operational primary NIN representation.

The Telecom Master would also ensure that users provide their NINS to serve as a secondary NIN.

The policy also provides that to activate IOT and M2M, SIM security protocols would be implemented on the SIM profile to ensure that SIMS can only be used for pointto-point data service specific to the URL they are working with. All other services will be barred. A machine- tomachine is a combination of devices or “machines” using network resources to communicate with remote application infrastructure for the purposes of monitoring and control, or either the

“machine” itself or of the environment. Thus, M2M doesn’t simply create a passive data collection point but an intelligent inter-machine coordination ecosystem.

“In the event that a dataonly service is particular to individual use (example: home car tracking, Wifi, Mifi services, etc), the standard NIN registration process will be followed,” a statement from NCC said.