The New Nation - Internet Edition

Staff Reporter

The operators, within a week, will start to disconnect tens of thousands of mobile phones of the subscribers who bought those before Feb 28, 2006 but could not register it again by yesterday, officials of the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) said.

"The cut of lines will not start after the zero hour tonight.

It may take some more days, as the operators will have to account the number of re-registered numbers held by Friday," an official of BTRC told The New Nation yesterday.

He, however, said that disconnection of an unregistered SIM account is a must, as the operators will have to oblige BTRC's decision. The BTRC has no decision to extend deadline for re-registration further, he added.

The BTRC officials could not say how much subscribers left out from the re-registration process as huge people gathered at the registration points of mobile operators at the final day of the deadline.

The exact number might be available within a week, they said. The companies would submit reports to the telecom regulator by this time.

Meanwhile, thousands of mobile phone subscribers thronged the registration centres in the capital during the last two days. People were seen in long queue in all the centres opened by the operators.

The subscribers expressed their dissatisfaction, for they had to come for the second time to register and suffer hazards at the cost of their valuable time.

Many of the operators did not provide any incentive for this. While going back from the Citycell's registration point at Kakrail, Advocate Nurul Islam, a subscriber, said, "I'm going back without re-registration, for the line is so long."

"It is nothing but a ploy to disturb us. Why did the Government and the operator maintain our data that we provided at the time of our purchasing the SIM four years back," he added.

Since last month, the operators started to offer incentives to lure their subscribers to re-register to avoid losses in business by losing a large number of subscribers. Only the latecomers could avail of the opportunity not the people who re-registered in early times.

Grameenphone, that leads the market with 1.80 crore subscribers, has already offered Tk 100 free talk time to a subscriber for re-registering by the deadline.

However, the mobile operators informed that response for re-registration was satisfactory at the fag end of the deadline. The operators kept re-registration points open even longer to cope with the onrush of people.

"Responses of users to re-registration are satisfactory," Mujibur Rahman, Managing Director of state-run mobile phone operator Teletalk told reporters.

As of Thursday, 78 percent of Teletalk users filled out re-registration forms, he informed. He also hoped that that 12 percent more would sign up by Sunday.

On August 16 last year, BTRC asked mobile phone operators to take steps for re-registration of the SIM cards sold before February 28, 2006.

BTRC had extended the deadline four times.

"Users had crowded the re-registration points at the eleventh hour," Syed Yamin Bakht, Director (public relations) of the country's largest mobile operator Grameenphone said.

Sulayman Alam, head of public relations and information of Banglalink, said the company employed additional employees for re-registration.

Bangladesh's total number of mobile users rose by nearly 58 percent in 2007 to 3.44 crore, according to the BTRC.

The six mobile phone operators added 45.30 lakh new subscribers in January-March, lifting the user base to 3.89 crore in one of Asia's fastest growing cellular markets.

Several market surveys have forecast the number of mobile phone users will be around 7 crore by the end of 2011.