Afriwave to waive $3m telco monitoring fee

Afriwave has promised to wave the monthly cost of $3 million on telecommunication traffic monitoring to the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA).

According to Afriwave, the decision is part of its “contribution to national development and social responsibility,” as it plans to take over that service.

“Afriwave Telecom Ghana Ltd considers the provision of the revenue information to GRA at no cost as its contribution to national development, and a social responsibility in support of national revenue mobilization.

“The company has already commenced the traffic monitoring. The provision of reports can be made available to GRA without delay and have attached for your kind attention, reports generated by the ICH for recent months,” a letter from Afriwave to the Finance Ministry dated May 3, 2016 in possession of Starrfmonline.com stated.

Subah Infosolutions Limited after its one-year telecoms revenue monitoring contract with the GRA ended on May 6, 2016 with Afriwave Telecom GH Ltd (ATGL) which was licensed by the National Communications Authority (NCA) to provide Interconnect Clearing House (ICH) services in the country, taking over.

GRA in a letter dated February 4, 2016 officially wrote to Subah to notify it of its decision not to renew the five-year contract it had with the private company.

According to insiders, Afriwave is reportedly using a far more effective technology in intercepting fraudulently routed international calls by SIM box fraudsters and is saving the government far more.

This comparative analysis was realised because between October 2015 and May 2016 when Afriwave was allowed to hook its machines to the ICH platform, over a whopping 300,000 of calls that would have been frequently routed to SIM-box fraud operators had been truncated while Subah was only able to manage a 50,000 busts the whole of the 2015 period a development experts say smacks of suspicion.

Subah’s technique, according to telecom experts, gives it a lot of discretion to determine when it swoops down on SIM Box fraudster, but Afriwaves’s technology is such that it detects the fraud at the point when international calls enters the country before they are re-routed by SIM Box fraudsters. Upon detection, its systems automatically block the re-routing and demobilize the systems of the SIM-box fraudster.

The GRA contracted SUBAH in 2010 to electronically monitor revenue generated by the telecom companies to enable them calculate and collect the right taxes from the companies. The contract derived from the Communications Service Tax, which was passed in 2007 is worth $100 million per year.

However, the mandate of Subah became inconsistent as the multi-million SIM box fraud used to intercept international calls boomed.

Therefore, on the December 2, 2014, the NCA invited applications for the granting of a license for the ICH, and by December 17, 2014 a total of 5 applications had been received according to the Application Evaluation Panel (AEP) report. The applicants were: Afriwave Telecom Ghana Limited, Subah Infosolutions, Prodigy International Limited, TCMS-GVG Consortium Limited and Channel IT Ghana Limited.

After assessing the applications, the 8-member AEP (under the Chairmanship of Albert E. Enninful) submitted its report on the 29th of January 2015, after which Afriwave was chosen.