Last-minute rush for biometric SIM re-registration spells user trouble

Mobile-phone subscribers are sweating it out to re-register their SIM cards with biometric details at the last minute.

The crowds at the SIM re-registration centres were huge at the weekend, Friday, as the deadline for biometric re-registration ends Saturday.

Many of the customers had to wait hours on end.

One Shipon Mustakim told bdnews24.com he was told at the Grameenphone centre at Dhaka’s Farmgate that the server was down.

He got his SIM re-registered after waiting for a long time.

Customers outside Dhaka also faced trouble at customer care centres and retail points.

The mobile-phone operators said the surge in the final hours had overloaded the server.

“But the registration process did not stop,” a senior official of an operator said, requesting anonymity.

State Minister for Post and Telecommunication Tarana Halim told reporters on Friday that 83.8 million of the 130 million SIM cards had been re-registered by Thursday morning.

About the ‘complications’ in the server, she said the NID wing of the Election Commission told her its server was not down.

The NID wing server verifies the biometric details sent by operators.

The Association of Mobile Telecom Operators of Bangladesh (AMTOB) has blamed the additional pressure for the ‘complications’.

“The technicians of the operators and NID authorities are working to resolve the problem,” AMTOB General Secretary TIM Nurul Kabir told bdnews24.com.

After the launch of the process in December last year, at least 10 million customers have failed to re-register as their fingerprints did not match.

The customers also have to provide biometric details to buy new SIM cards.

Tarana said the future roadmap of the biometric registration will be decided after Saturday, the day the deadline for completing the process expires.

The re-registration centres are open until 10pm on Saturday.