The mandatory registration of prepaid SIM cards by the NBTC was decided for security reason as many unregistered SIM cards had been used by southern insurgents in igniting bomb explosions, and some were used to deceive the people.
The NBTC held a meeting with five state and private mobile phone operators yesterday (January 21) and reached an agreement that the service providers will notify their prepaid customers to produce identification documents for registration of their SIM cards from February 1 to July 31.
Failure to register their prepaid SIM cards, service providers will cut off their phone signals, thus disrupting their outgoing calls and Internet connections.
However they still can use the phones to receive call for a certain period. At present there are 90 million prepaid users but only 1.7 million have registered.
Meanwhile the NBTC said it will hold a public forum to sound out opinions from the people on the per second call charge to be introduced before mandating all operators to replace their per minute call charge to per second call charge.
It also said that by February 14, all phone operators will roll out per-second call charge promotion packages to their customers as part of the “Returning Happiness to the People” scheme of the military junta.
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