Telecom regulatory body seals 4 offices in Lagos

The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), this week sealed four telecoms firms over cases of alleged illegal operations.

Assistant Director, Salisu Abdu who led the team said three more illegal operators were on NCC's watch list, with expectation that their identity would have been discovered by Friday, December 12, 2014, when the enforcement team would round off the exercise.

The four affected operators are; Steam Communications, Netcom, SwiftTalk and Multi-dimensions Technologies, all located in Lagos.

Speaking with ICT journalists during the enforcement, Abdu said: "In the course of the guideline, we have monitored compliance and we have discovered that we still had some operators operating illegally on the 5.4GHz till 2012. We have done a lot of clean-up and we thought the frequency was free of interferences. So after recent monitoring by the Spectrum Administration Department of NCC, about seven operators are now discovered to be operating on the 5.4GHz band.

"On Tuesday, we visited Steam Communications Company and we found they were operating on the 5.4GHz band and as a result, we confiscated their radio equipment and they are currently under investigation."

According to him, at the end of the investigation, Steam Communications would be prosecuted and fined appropraitely.

Abdu said the enforcement team also discovered Netcom, SwiftTalk and Multi-dimension co-locating their equipment on a telecom mast belonging to a licensed inter-connect clearing operator.

He said: "currently, we have removed the power units which the three tenant-companies are using to power their service. We have asked them to remove the actual radio equipment from the mast which they are handing over to the Commission and investigation would be carried out accordingly."

Abdu, however, said the mast owner, which housed the three telecoms firms on its network was not culpable, because "the mast owner is n ot under obligation to make findings on whether or not the three companies are licensed by the NCC or not."

He added that the guideline on 5.4GHz spectrum band clearly stipulates conditions for commercial and private use of the frequency band.