WHat’s up with South Sudan Country code 211?
4 min readDear All,
If I may, a colleague drew my attention to the issue of +211 being discussed in Internet fora and thought I could shed some light on the subject. I have not been lately following the fora due to pressures on time and many competing priorities.
That said, however, to my knowledge, all operators in RSS have not completed registration with GSM-A, an international body which co-ordinates between members and operators exchange of traffic, such as international calls and roaming between operators, be it on bilateral or multi-lateral mobile traffic exchange across international borders.
GSM-A registration for mobile operators enable them negotiate rates with other traffic carriers for inbound traffic to RSS or outbound traffic termination into other geographies around the globe, through bilateral and multi-lateral agreements with international carriers.
And because of absence of these arrangements for most operators in RSS, international carriers forwarding traffic to RSS are free to charge any rates and not bound by any agreements with local operators in RSS. For instance, Zain South Sudan, Gemtel, Vivacell or MTN and Sudani mobile operators in RSS all need to sign agreements for traffic exchange (call terminations for inbound or outbound) with other international carriers, but this is not possible without registration with GSM-A (you can google GSMA to learn more about it).
So, Zain, Gemtel, Vivacell, Sudani and MTN all need to gain registration with GSM-A, and there are specific requirements for admission into GSMA membership which the Ministry of Telecommunications and Postal Services in RSS (as the regulator) should publish to GSMA about in-country mobile operators. The information is important for commercial reasons and purposes of settling call charges between legitimate entities in the international system of mobile communications.
The Ministry (MTPS) needs to write to GSMA to confirm the status of local operators (licenses, frequencies, etc) which GSMA would use to register local operators and publish the information to international carriers, most of who are GSMA members. As members, operators are required to adhere to agreed code of practice and industry standards for carriage and terminations of inbound and outbound traffic between countries, operators and so forth. This is currently lacking, hence the high rates of calls terminations to RSS.
The registration process in addition to concluding commercial agreements with international carries may take between 3 – 6 months. We have written to the MTPS to follow up on publishing in-country mobile operators information to GSMA to confirm status of operators, etc and some of these operators might only be in South Sudan without footprint in other countries, and little known operators would find themselves in difficult situation trying to negotiate better commercial terms for their interconnection with international carriers, whereas those with large footprint already have existing interconnection and roaming agreements with carriers and would not have to go through protracted commercial negotiations to agree rates for termination of outbound or inbound calls for RSS.
The Government cannot do these negotiations for operators, it only needs to give information about these operators to GSMA and the operators are left on their own to reach bilateral or multi-lateral agreements with carriers for their calls in the international market.
So, even though ITU has assigned +211 country code to us, carriers are free to interconnect or not interconnect with RSS operators as based on commercial agreements with in-country operators on competitive terms. Our Telecom ministry has now taken steps to write to GSMA so that local operators gain acceptance for registration with GSMA for new comers as well as updates for existing members and any of their new operations.
Hope this clarifies some of the issues surrounding +211 interconnection with international carriers of mobile traffic.
Kind regards
Dr. Hakim
Zain South Sudan
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