News Desk : dhakamirror.com
BTRC (Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission) will disable more than 15 SIMs registered to a single national identity (NID.)
There are a total of 3.13 million such SIM cards under 7.24 million NIDs, according to the telecom regulator, and they will all be terminated by November 30.
A user may register a maximum of 15 SIMs against his or her NID card, according the BTRC regulation.
The decision was made during a recent commission meeting. The BTRC will take a range of actions to deactivate more than 3 million SIMs.
The SIMs will first be listed by the BTRC’s central biometrics verification monitoring platform (CBVMP), which will then send the list to the relevant operators.
The carriers will get in touch with SIM owners and ask them to reduce the number of SIMs to 15. The clients will receive SMS requests from the operators to accomplish this.
To alert the public, both the BTRC and the operators will post notices on websites and news outlets. The procedure will go on until October 15.
If the SIM users do not remove their SIMs by this date, the CBVMP and the operators will list 15 SIMs by October 31 based on MFS accounts and revenue from the previous six months.
The operators will then receive the list of additional SIMs to be deregistered by November 30.
The BTRC agreed to limit the number of SIM cards that each customer might use to 20 in June 2016. The commission shifted its position and set the limit at 15 in October
The BTRC has repeatedly asked customers who own more than 15 SIM cards to cancel their additional contact numbers independently from the appropriate customer service centers.
An official stated that the BTRC was unable to disable the SIMs because it lacked unified user data, including the NID, voter ID, vehicle registration number, and passport number.
However, those who have corporate approval to purchase SIM cards will be exempt from this deactivation, he added.
Users can find out how many SIM cards they have associated with their passport, NID, driver’s license, or birth certificate in one of two ways: either by sending an SMS to 16001 with the last four digits of their NID number or by dialing *16001# and sending the information when prompted by the USSD code.
