Phone registration started today in earnest at Telemedia and SMART. As we've reported, government has announced that it intends to institute a 9 year old law which requires that all cellular phone numbers be registered to a duly identified name.
We stopped in at both phone companies to see how it was going:..
Anjali Vasquez, BTL Public Relations Manager "You bring in your SIM card, you bring in your valid ID and yourself - your person and that's it, our customer service rep. does the rest. It's absolutely free so, at the end of the day it takes about 10 minutes to do."
Ian Courtenay, SMART Public Relations Manager
"It's free of cost to the customer and a customer walking in not meeting a line, it takes nothing more than 5 minutes its simply having the phone itself with them so that we can take the electronic serial number of the phone if necessary and their ID, once they have that ready we photocopy it and fill out the necessary information, it takes nothing more than 5 minutes. My understanding is the regulation is being given a grace period of 6 months so that will take it to March 15th, 2012 will be the deadline and according to the Minister responsible we will be instructed to any numbers that have not been registered are to be turned off."
Anjali Vasquez, BTL Public Relations Manager
"Since the inception of prepaid numbers they have been anonymous and now we are asking our entire customer which is our larger customer base to come in and register. For the beginning, for the first six months we anticipate there will be an influx of people but from this day forward anybody who buys an new number has to already register. The benefit of registering your number is that it then
belongs to you, if you lose your phone for instance or it's stolen and you report it right away we can then hold that number for you and any credit that you might have had at the time of it being stolen and your reporting it, we can hold on to that credit for you."
Ian Courtenay, SMART Public Relations Manager
"We have checked with our attorneys to ensure that nothing we are doing will infringe upon the rights of our customers. The registration of the numbers perse is not necessarily a strange or devious thing because postpaid customers it happen anyways, the thing that concern customers more is that they have been told that we have to save information - the customers personal records, their calling activities, their texting activities and so on. That is of more concern to us and to our customers, of course the cost to the company of doing that also increases the because if we are forced to save all that information for all our customers indefinitely or for an extended period of time that's storage - the storage devices needs to keep that information. The company will have to ensure that we have sufficient storage facilities, so it does create a cost to the company and when it becomes clearer of what the intention is and for long this information has to be stored, we can then make an assessment of what this piece of legislation will cost the company."
Anjali Vasquez, BTL Public Relations Officer
"The concern that the phone being tapped, that something that the company does not exercise, so really and truly it is so that your number has an owner, there are all these numbers out there and there is no number to that number so now that the number is registered it belongs to you the individual."
You have until March 15th. to register your phone and if you don't do it by then, you risk disconnection. According to the phone companies' figures, there are approximately more than 250 thousand prepaid cell phones in the country.
