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