The National Communications Authority (NCA) has announced that it has delinked all Surfline SIMs from the Central SIM Database.
This comes after months of service outage on Surfline because leading tower company, ATC Ghana stopped supporting Surfline’s network equipment due to alleged non-payments of bills.
ATC Ghana told Techfocus24 that it had to discontinue pre-financing power and fuel bills for Surfline because for the past seven years the company had failed to settle its bills and all efforts to get them to pay it off, including some concessions, had proved futile.
Techfocus24 learnt that Surfline was supposed to pay ATC Ghana at least GHS2.5 million every month. But due to cash flow problems, the company was given a concession, with the consent of the NCA, to pay at least GHS1.5 million every month until their legacy debt is paid off. However, over time, Surfline defaulted on that as well and could only manage GHS1.1 million a month.
So, ATC Ghana stopped supporting Surfline equipment leading to the service outage, following which NCA engaged Surfline on the way forward, including the delinking and removal of Surfline SIMs from the Central SIM Database.
With the SIMs delinking now done, NCA says all subscribers who had reached the ceiling of 10 individual SIMs because of their Surfline SIMs, will now be able to link additional SIMs to their Ghana Cards since the Surfline SIMs have now been removed.
“We also wish to reaffirm our unrelenting commitment to protect the interest of Surfline customers and all users of telecommunications services in Ghana,” it added.
Techfocus24 has learnt that there are steps underway to get affected Surfline customers compensated for the months of service outage and for the loss of the prepaid data that they just lost on their delinked SIM cards.