The government of Egypt has recently unveiled a plan to block all IMEI-less mobile phones. More precisely, it was the country’s National Telecom Regulatory Authority (NTRA) which decided to block services to all anonymous users and made-in-China cell phones without IMEI in Egyptian market.
Hassanein el-Shoura, a member of Egyptian People’s Assembly (the lower house of parliament), doesn’t (fully) agree with this move and has asked the parliament to query Communications and Information Technology Minister Tareq Kamel on the NTRA’s decision.
According to el-Shoura, the problem is that Chinese mobile phones represent 70% of handsets in Egypt. That’s kinda too steep figure, which I find hard to believe. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve no doubts there are quite a few China-made phones in Egypt, but I’m sure not all of them lack IMEI.
Anyway, NTRA officials responded saying it is impossible to cut services to all the unknown mobile phones at the same time due to scale issues.
So what will happen? We don’t have the epilog, but I think some kind of gradual shut-down will be introduced. In the meantime, I’m sure major handset makers are preparing hot offers for all the Egyptian mobile phone users that won’t be able to use their phones any more.
As a reminder, a similar thing happened in India, where the government quoted security reasons to ban the use of mobile phones which lack IMEI.
[Via: CellularNews]