It maybe recalled that PTA had issued a directive to all cellular operators on November 13th, 2012, asking them to shut down their sales network and that SIMs will be dispatched to customers’ home addresses given on their CNICs.
More Magazine reports that Ufone, Mobilink, Telenor and Warid have registered 15 to 20 per-cent growth rate in new sales after November 13 directive, while Zong has achieved staggering 200 percent growth rate.
Along with cellular companies, mobile phone subscribers are also taking these final days as a final chance to buy SIMs from retailers instead of waiting for days for SIM delivery to their homes after December 1st.
Having said this all, the idea of curbing unregistered SIMs by dispatching SIMs to home addresses after December 1st is likely to get failed, because 120 million already sold SIMs and millions of SIMs which are being sold during these final days (freely and at times bypassing all the SOPs) will go unchecked.
This is what exactly we discussed in our previous report in which we explained that why new rule of dispatching SIMs to home addresses isn’t the ultimate solution for elimination of unregistered SIMs from the market.
High-ups at Pakistan Telecommunication Authority are either un-aware of the market situation, which is very unprofessional, or they are simply ignoring the entire scenario and leaving us with no option but to think that agenda behind new directive isn’t national security but something else.