Subah Info Solutions goes international

Subah Info Solutions Ltd, a wholly owned Ghanaian telecommunications solutions and support company, has made forays into Guinea, with plans to start operations in other African countries, including The Gambia, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, Zambia, Congo DR, Tanzania, Kenya and Lesotho.

Already in Guinea, the company has a contract to do local call monitoring of the five network operators in that country, international traffic terminations, SIM fraud management and quality of service (QoS) management.

This was disclosed during a dialogue the company had with the members of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Communications in Accra yesterday.

The dialogue was to afford the MPs the opportunity to know more about Subah and what it did, the value of its work to the state and the avenues it created for young trained engineers.

In an overview of the operations of Subah since it started operation in 2007, its General Manager in charge of Business Development and Projects, Mr Redeemer Kwame, said the company signed a contract with the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) in 2010 to assist in taxing telecom companies in

Ghana with their revenue assurance and verification services.

He listed other achievements of the company as its launch of a SIM box fraud detection initiative in 2012 which assisted the National Communications

Authority (NCA) in the detection of SIM box fraud that saved the country about $6.5 million in telecom revenues.

The company also deployed solar-powered telephony infrastructure service to seven sites in the Volta, Ashanti and Northern regions in 2013, introduced the digitising of records known as DocuWare in 2014, among other key milestones.

Savings from SIM Box
Mr Kwame said 24 SIM fraud gangs had been arrested in Ghana since 2012, adding that their SIM fraud operations saved the country about US$10 million each month.

He added that while the SIM box detection services deployed at the NCA and the GRA generated 400,000 calls every month, global revenue loss in the telecom industry in 2010 alone was estimated at US$150 million.

Touching on the revenue made by the state as a result of Subah’s call monitoring, he said while the average revenue per month was GH¢25.7 million before Subah started operations, it moved from GH¢36.1 million in 2010 to GH¢68 million in 2015, with a projection to reach GH¢70 million in 2016.

Renewal of contract
Speaking on the renewal of the government’s contract with Subah, Mr Kwame told the MPs, “Our flagship product, which is revenue monitoring, is a contract which has to be renewed, and based on our findings and the capacities that we have built we have invested heavily, with the hope that it will be renewed.”

In an interview with the Daily Graphic on the same issue, the Managing Director of Subah, Mr Birenda Sasmal, said, “We are already in Guinea; we are already talking to Congo DR, Zambia, Kenya and other advanced countries. They have been coming to us to invite us and we are working very hard on that.”

We never took a facility for our work
Meanwhile, the management of Subah has refuted claims that it received financial support from the government to set up and operate.

Mr Sasmal and Mr Kwame took turns to refute the assertion in response to a question posed during the dialogue with the MPs.

Bad Press
Responding to a suggestion to rebrand due to the bad press that the company had received, Mr Sasmal said he rather thought because the company had done nothing wrong, it had to face the challenges and prove the sceptics wrong.

The Chairman of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Communications, Mr Albert Abongo, said the committee had recognised the tremendous work of Subah and pledged to partner the company “to ensure Subah achieves a lot for this country”.

Writer’s email: edmund.asante@graphic.com.gh