The Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) will reportedly disable the addition of more than 15 SIMs registered under a single national identity (NID.)
BTRC has reportedly identified a total of such 3.13 million SIM cards under 7.24 million NIDs, which will be deactivated by November 30, 2022.
As per the BTRC decision, a subscriber is allowed to register a maximum of 15 SIMs against his/her NID card. The decision has been taken in a recent commission meeting. To deactivate more than 3 million SIMs, the BTRC will reportedly take a number of following steps-
- The BTRC’s central biometrics verification monitoring platform (CBVMP) will first list the SIMs, and the list will be sent to the concerned telecom operators.
- The telecom operators will then notify the SIM owners and request them to cut down the number of SIMs to 15. The operators will be asked to send SMS to the users to do so.
- Both the BTRC and the telecom operators will also publish notices on websites and news media to inform the public. The process will continue until October 15, 2022.
- If the SIM users do not deactivate the SIMs within the time frame, the CBVMP and the operators will list 15 SIMs – based on revenue of the last six months and MFS accounts by October 31.
- Then the list of additional SIMs will be sent to the operators for deregistration by November 30.
In June 2016, the BTRC decided to allow each consumer to use a maximum of 20 SIM cards which was reportedly restructured to 15 SIMs per consumer in October 2017.
However, personnel who have corporate permission to buy SIMs will be out of the purview of this deactivation process.
Here’s how you can find out the number of SIM cards you have against your passport, NID, driving license, or birth certificate-
- Dial *16001# and send the last four digits of the NID number when asked through the USSD code.
- Send an SMS to 16001 typing the last four digits of the NID number.
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