The Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) in a public announcement has asked mobile users to deactivate SIMs beyond 15 under one NID card.
The telecoms regulator will block the excess SIMs randomly if the users do not disable them on their own choice by November 15, it said.
The BTRC has recently identified a total of 3,126,577 SIMs (subscriber identity modules) under 723,923 national identity (NID) cards.
As per the BTRC decision, a subscriber is allowed to register maximum 15 SIMs against his/her NIDs (NID, passport, birth certificate or driving licence).
To deactivate more than 3.0-million SIMs, the regulator has taken a number of measures.
The BTRC's Central Biometrics Verification Monitoring Platform recorded the SIMs and sent the lists to the operators concerned, according to the commission.
The operators then requested the users concerned through SMSs to bring down the number of SIMs to 15.
On 12 June 2016, the BTRC decided to allow each subscriber to use a maximum of 20 SIMs. On 24 October 2017, it revised the decision and set the number at 15.
Earlier, the BTRC several times urged the consumers, who have more than 15 SIM cards, to deactivate the extras from their respective customer care centres.
An official said it was not possible for the BTRC to deactivate the SIMs for having no combined user data, including their voter ID, vehicle registration number and passport number.
However, only the users having corporate permission to buy SIMs will be out of the purview of this deactivation process, he added.
A user can find the number of SIMs they have against their passport, NID, driving licence or birth certificate in two ways.
They can dial *16001# and send the last four digits of their NID number when asked through a USSD code.
They also have an option to send an SMS to 16001 typing the last four digits of their NID number.
