The cell phone owners who have failed to get their numbers re-registered within the extended deadline (May 31) will not get any more chance to do so.
"The drive continued for nine months. The numbers which were not re-registered will be blocked", said an official of the Bangladesh Telecom Regulatory Commission (BTRC).
Meanwhile, after expiry of the deadline for re-registration on Saturday, the country's cell phone operators have started counting the re-registered numbers and the numbers that will be facing deactivation.
"We are yet to get full statistics but we are expecting it soon," said Syed Yamin Bakht, Director (Public relations) of Grameen Phone (GP), the largest cell phone operator in the country.
He said the GP is awaiting a BTRC decision on the fate of the thousands of cell phone numbers which were not re-registered.
Although the mobile operators and the regulator are yet to give any figure, it is estimated that nearly one million numbers were not re-registered. Of this the big chunk belongs to the GP.
The BTRC official expects to get the estimate on unregistered numbers within a day or two.
Shakil Ahmed, HR Manager of Aktel said, on the last day cell phone owners were in cell phone centres until late night to re-register their numbers.
It is estimated that around 90 percent of the mobile phone subscribers had completed the re-registration process on the last day.
BTRC suspects that there have been some fake re-registration and it will verify even individual profiles of subscribers, said the BTRC official.
Earlier in August last year BTRC issued an order to Grameenphone, AKTEL, Banglalink, Citycell and TeleTalk to re-register customers who bought connections before February 28, 2006. BTRC extended the deadline four times.
The number of total mobile phone subscribers reached 40.34 million in April this year.
