Senate Minority Leader Aquilino “Koko” Pimentel III said there is no need to extend the ongoing SIM card registration which will end on April 26.
He said the object of the law is really to find out which SIMs are not being used for illegal activities.
“If only 44% are worth keeping active, then so be it,” he added.
Sen. Win Gatchalian also believes there is no need to extend the deadline as SIM registration will never reach 100%. There are an estimated 110 million prepaid SIM cards in the Philippines.
“Our population including children and babies is 109 million,” he said, adding that 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 said.
An extension of the SIM Card registration period loomed very likely as more than 40 percent of cell phone users in the country still have to comply with the list-up with only four days left in the original time frame set by the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT).
Telecommunication companies (telcos) Smart, Globe, and DITO said the requirement for identification cards (IDs) posed a big problem in the registration process.
DICT Secretary Ivan John Uy said they will meet on Monday with representatives of the telcos and other stakeholders with a view to identifying solutions to the problem.
The DICT said earlier ruled out any extension of the April 26 SIM registration deadline despite calls from telcos to give their respective customers more time to register.
