Safaricom accuses international calls firm of illegal connections
Mr Francis Wangusi, the CA chief: IGS is not a regulated licence service. PHOTO | FILE
Safaricom has accused an international calls company, Geonet, of making illegal connections through its network.
Safaricom wants the Communications Authority (CA) to audit Geonet’s local network to verify the claims.
Geonet is locked in a three-year dispute with Safaricom, Airtel and Telkom Kenya over its bid to sign an international calls termination agreement with the telcos.
The firm, initially registered in Delaware USA in 2000, has an international gateway service (IGS) provider licence granted by CA. It has not used the licence, however, owing to the dispute.
“We wish to bring to the attention of the Authority the illegal termination of international traffic by Geonet,” says Safaricom head of regulatory and public corporate affairs division Mercy Ndegwa in a letter dated April 26.
“The international traffic being refilled by Geonet is being terminated using local SIM cards which have been consistently picked by Safaricom SIM BOX monitoring system.”
Geonet took legal action against CA for failing to resolve the prolonged interconnection dispute with the local mobile network operators.
The operators are unwilling to allow Geonet’s international traffic to terminate on their networks, a matter which the CA has been unable to intervene in.
The CA director-general Francis Wangusi, says the regulator is unable to intervene in the dispute because IGS is not a regulated licence service.
In March, through lawyer Wambua Kilonzo, responding to Geonet’s suit, the regulator told High Court Judge George Odunga that there was no statutory provision allowing it to compel operators to interconnect any IGS provider at a fee.
Geonet says that the claims are “false accusations and anti-competitive posture by Safaricom.”
The termination of international calls to appear as local ones cuts revenue of mobile operators and denies the government taxes through by-passing carriers.
Geonet has refuted the claims saying “for over 10 years operations we have had trading agreements with a lot of global minute aggregators....”
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