Subscribers to lose ownership if SIM unused for 2 yrs

Mobile phone users will lose the ownership of their SIMs if their connections are left unused for two consecutive years, paving the way for the operators to resell the numbers, according to the telecom regulator.

A SIM connection may be automatically de-activated if it is not used for 90 consecutive days, said Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) in a directive on Thursday.

 The subscribers can re-activate it by recharging the minimum admissible amount anytime within 365 consecutively unused days.

If not, they can re-activate the connection by paying a fee of not more than Tk 100 within 730 consecutively unused days.

The connection will continue to remain the right of its registered consumer up to 730 consecutively unused days, even if it is de-activated.

Thereafter, mobile phone operators are allowed to reuse (re-sell/rent/re-register) the connection provided it is not placed under any particular restriction either by the BTRC or any other competent authority.

Mobile operators will maintain, in its own website, customer care centres and in the website of the BTRC the list of the connections that are to be reused.

In addition, mobile operators will have to preserve all information relevant to the registration and usage of all such connections.

Before reselling the phone numbers, operators will have to give three months' prior notice (after 730 consecutively unused days) in at least three renowned national newspapers (Bangla/English).

A connection can be resold only at a regular price.

The BTRC also fixed the validity and usability of periods of recharges. For example, a recharge of Tk 10 to Tk 30 will remain valid for 10 days, Tk 31-50 for 15 days, Tk 51-150 for 30 days, Tk 151-300 for 45 days, Tk 301-500 for 100 days, Tk 501- 999 for 180 days and Tk 1,000 and above for 360 days.

In another directive, the BTRC said if the consumer uses less volume of internet data than is admissible in one charging, the unconsumed amount of data-volume shall be carried forward and added to the admissible data-volume of the next charging. And the carried forward data shall be consumed first.

Another BTRC directive said after each outgoing voice or video call made by a pre-paid consumer, the user has to be notified, through unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) or through SMS, about talk-time used and charge deducted for that call, and the credit balance remaining thereafter.

In case of a data-volume based service, the consumer has to be notified about the usage through the USSD each time s/he disables the data connectivity.

There are six mobile operators in the country, with the number of mobile subscribers standing at 12.186 crore as of January this year. The number of internet users stood at 4.27 crore, according to the BTRC.