Together With Telecommunication Operators, Kominfo Test BM Cellphone Blocking

JAKARTA - The Ministry of Communication and Information (Kominfo) finally conducted a trial to block Black Market (BM) cellphones, today, February 17th. With this trial, the government hopes that the circulation of illegal cellular devices will quickly disappear in Indonesia, this blocking includes the International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number.

Not only the government, a number of telecommunication operators are also participating in realizing the trial of the new regulation. The Director of Standardization of Post and Information Technology Equipment of Kominfo, Mochamad Hadiyana, revealed that the testing for blocking BM cell phones will be held in a number of operator offices such as XL and Telkomsel.

Regarding this information, XL Axiata's Hear Corporate Communication Group, Tri Wahyuningsih, confirmed this. "Technical testing to ensure illegal cellphones are completely blocked today," said the woman who is familiarly called Ayu when contacted by VOI.

For information, currently checking the IMEI number is in the SIBINa system which is managed by the Ministry of Trade and the Ministry of Industry (Kemenperin). Meanwhile, Kominfo prepares a blacklist or whitelist mechanism to solve the problem of unregistered IMEIs.

At the XL office today, a trial was carried out using the blacklist mechanism by directly blocking cellphones detected illegally by the Equipment Identity Registration (EIR) system. This method will let the user know that the phone is illegal or not a few days after purchasing.

"Especially in XL, we will test it using the black list scenario," said Ayu.

The EIR system is also equipped with data in the form of MSISDN (mobile subscriber integrated services digital network number), IMSI (International Mobile Subscriber Identity) and user identities stored by cellular operators. Both of these are used by the government to carry out verification before blocking.

EIR is used so that the government can detect users accurately to avoid duplicate IMEIs. This double IMEI occurs due to the phenomenon of zombie IMEI or cloning IMEI. This phenomenon causes one IMEI number to be active at the same time.

However, today's trial will not directly affect illegal cellphone users, because the government and operators have only used dummy samples or BM cellphone data that are not used by the public.

"Only testing in a limited environment (control group), it has no impact on users," said Ayu.

So in fact, BM cell phone users can still enjoy cellular services, such as telephone, SMS and surfing the internet.

Others, this blocking also has a whitelist mechanism, which involves consumers checking whether the IMEI of a device is registered or not, when making a cellphone purchase. This method makes consumers know their cellphone is illegal or not before transacting.

As previously reported, Kominfo plans to implement the rules for blocking BM cell phones on April 18, 2020. Later this rule will apply to newly purchased mobile devices and their IMEI numbers are not registered with the Ministry of Industry. Meanwhile, active devices can still be used and there is no need to register an IMEI number.

For those of you who want to buy a cellphone, you should first check the IMEI number through this site.