[kictanet] CCK's Directive on counterfeit phones

[Chris Foster]

Kamotho, agree with your comments

Effectively you will disabling a huge number of Chinese phones, which 
are mainly used by millions of more marginal mobile phone users, bought 
seemingly legitimately through sellers and traders. As COFEK put it this 
rule would be "akin to scoring through an offside kick while next to a 
referee" http://bit.ly/nIWB04

Whilst I think we can agree that there are some genuine reasons to 
reduce fake IMEIs on phones, one cannot underestimate the significant 
effects that this regulation will have amongst phone users and their 
livelihoods, as phones are suddenly disabled.

In India, a similar directive occured on 1st Dec 2010 resulted in 
disasterous blackout for millions of poor mobile phone users. It also 
worth noting that in India, this happened even when there was strong 
advertising and an "implanting scheme", where innocent users would be 
able to fix their phones before the switch off. Can we at least expect 
that CCK will operate such a promotion/scheme to make users aware?

[By the way this directive is also very unlikely to stop 
"counterfeiting", grey market phone producers can easily duplicate 
IMEI's or take them from dead phones, which are much harder to detect 
without a cross-operator, cross-national mobile equipment registry 
databases.

The real way to stop such "counterfeiting" is to punish importers not 
the users, and enforce such standards at points of import and sale, not 
through such detrimental technological switch offs]

Regards
Chris

-- 
Christopher Foster
PhD Researcher, Centre for Development Informatics (CDI)
University of Manchester, UK

Mob: +44 (0)7751 537350
Skype: cgfoster

On 27/08/11 12:46, Kamotho Njenga wrote:
>
> Kamotho Njenga