Pakistan, Islamabad (Web Desk):
During the first two weeks of SIM re-verification process, 8.72 million SIMs
has been verified and about 2 millions are blocked with biometrically verification
process. With this process, every customer of every cellular company must be
re-verified till 14 March, 2015.
This information was told to National
Assembly’s Standing Committee on Information Technology and Telecommunication
on Friday.
Committee was added that more
than 2 million SIMs were blocked during first 2 weeks because their owners
denied to have those issued mobile numbers or they never registered in their
names. After the given deadline, the unverified
SIMs will be blocked and the users will get their blocked numbers after paying
the SIM replacement fee.
It is estimated that only half of
the SIMs will be re-verified till 14 April, 2015.
“Three months is not reasonable
time for such an uphill task but such are the directions from the Ministry of
Interior,” PTA Chairman Dr Ismail Shah told the standing committee. Previously
the proposed time frame duration for re-verification of SIMs was one year.
Ad hoc stats show that around 25%
SIMs are being cancelled by the customers because either such SIMs are not in
their possession now or they had never bought/held them.
These 25% SIM cancellations
coupled with those subscribers who won’t be able to make it to service centers/retailers
till April 13th, 2015 for biometric re-verification and their SIMs, the total
SIM cancellation rate might hit 50%. Service centers, franchises and
retail outlets of cellular companies remained filled with long-queues all day
long.
Women and senior citizens face serious problems while
re-verifying their SIMs and telecom companies are helpless as their support
channels were never designed to handle such huge number of customers.
Industry experts are skeptical
about the whole re-verification exercise and they are uncertain about the
results and productivity of the drive.
No comments:
Post a Comment