SENATORS yesterday said there is no need to extend the SIM card registration beyond the April 26 deadline since doing so will defeat its purpose of weeding out the ones being used in illegal activities.
Senate minority leader Aquilino Pimentel III said the SIM card registration aims to determine which ones are being used for “serious, legal, important purposes” and do away with the ones being used otherwise.
“No need to extend. The object of the law is really to find out which SIMs are not being used for serious, legal, and important purposes. If only 44 percent are worth keeping active, then so be it,” Pimentel said.
Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian said it is expected that the number of SIMs registered will not reach 100 percent of the number of SIMs sold.
“There is no need to extend the deadline as SIM registration will never reach 100 percent,” Gatchalian said.
“There are an estimated 110 million prepaid SIM cards. Our population, including children and babies, is 109 million. This means that many people own multiple prepaid SIM cards. It is natural that the number of prepaid SIM cards will go down because people are already foregoing ownership of multiple prepaid SIM cards,” he added.
Last Saturday, the Department of Information and Communications Technology said it would meet with telecommunication companies and other stakeholders to determine if the extension of the SIM registration is needed as some subscribers are having a hard time registering their SIM cards due to difficulty in securing valid IDs.
Sen. Grace Poe, Committee on Public Services chairperson, earlier said the public should give the SIM card registration “one final push” as the April 26 deadline nears.
RA 11934 or the SIM Registration Act, the first measure signed into law by President Marcos last October, regulates the use of SIM cards by mandating all end-users to register their mobile phone numbers.
The measure was introduced by Poe in the Senate.
A similar bill was passed in the 18th Congress but was vetoed by then President Duterte due to the inclusion of social media accounts that also needed to be registered.
As of April 20, the DICT said a total of 76,927,923 subscribers have registered their SIMs, which is equivalent to about 45 percent of the more than 168 million SIM cards sold nationwide.
