NCC withdraws 36.6m telephone lines from telcos

The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has withdrawn 36.6 million telephone lines from telecommunications operators.

According to a document made available on the NCC website, the directive took effect on March 20, 2018.

A telephone numbering plan is a type of scheme used in telecommunication to assign telephone numbers to subscriber telephones or other telephony endpoints. Telephone numbers are the addresses of participants in a telephone network, reachable by a system of destination code routing.

The Numbering Plan is an addressing mechanism for communication networks, which enables routing of traffic to designated networks. NNP is sometimes used to identify different types of services.

The operators affected are Starcomms, Zoom Mobile, Multilinks, Alpha Wireless Limited; Disc Communications; Mobitel; Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria Limited, Odu’a Telecoms Limited, Rainbownet, Gicell Wireless Limited, Broadband Technology Limited, BIG Communications Limited, Bell and Bell Telecoms.

“They were withdrawn because they were not in use in those locations and numbering is a national resource that is either used or reverts to the commission. Numbering fees are paid annually to keep the numbers by the networks. They are either used or recovered by the regulator,” a source at the commission told TheCable.

Cities where the lines were withdrawn from include Lagos, Abuja, Enugu; Gombe; Oyo; Port Harcourt; Oshogbo, Ile-Ife; Warri; Sapele; Ijebu-Ode; Ado-Ekiti; Ilorin; Auchi; Lokoja; Asaba; Jos; Ibadan, Akure; Calabar, Umuahia, among others.

The ranges of these numbers include 770,000; 550000; 710000; 499000; 780000; 8770000; 220,000; 4,100,000; 7070000000, among others.

The area codes of these numbers include 053; 073, 044; 01; 084; 09; 052; 038, and others.

Lines returned to Nigerian Telecommunications Limited and Visafone.