TCRA Director General Engineer James Kilaba disclosed this in Dar es Salaam yesterday at a news conference attended by all the mobile phone service providers across the country, saying all operators had agreed to halt the adverts effective yesterday, July 6.
Eng. Kilaba said the decision has been made after the authority received many complaints raised by many mobile phones users on the issue of advertising or promotion announcements offered by mobile phone companies before a client call is connected.
He said as the regulator of communications they wrote to all the six mobile phones service providers on the matter and met yesterday to give them more clarification on the matter which is against the Electronic and Postal Communications (Values Added Services) and Consumer Protection regulations of 2015 and 2011 respectively.
He urged the service providers to abide with the regulations and provide quality services to their customers as the authority is satisfied that some of the mobile service providers are not abiding with the regulation which has resulted to the raise of the complaints.
According to the TCRA boss, those who will go against the order or directives of the authority will face the consequences whereby the maximum penalty is the revoke of the service provider oper ating licence.
“As Communications regulator we are aware of the matter which for some customers it’s of great disturbance as we believe that when a caller makes a call, he or she might have an emergency and needs to be connected directly and fast instead of receiving a variety of advertisement announcements or music before being connected, so we demand all the operators to stop it immediately from today (yesterday), “ said Eng. Kilaba.
Giving more clarification on the matter, Eng. Kilaba urged the mobile phones services firm in the country which has the custom of providing to their customers with business adverts to halt them and ensure they connect them directly without wasting their precious time.
However Eng. Kilaba unveiled that business adverts are not prohibited to be provided by the mobile phones service operators but the only problem with the adverts is where they are slotted by the operators and that has been a major problem to many of their customers.
Meanwhile TCRA has as well advised all Electronic media outlets in the country to abide with the code of adversting and sponsorship to ensure that business adverts aired are well and carefully prepared so as to ensure they do not distort the public or to provide an image that damages Tanzanian culture and morals.
Furthermore the authority wanted media to be aware that business adverts announcements contribute significantly to the development of Swahili language or to demolish it as there are some major challenges in the use of fluent language in some of the adverts and leads which has resulted to misuse or misinterpretation of some of the words among people in the community.
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