The National Communication Authority (NCA) has announced that as at March 3, 2012 16 million plus SIM cards have registered validly and some 1,524,891 have also been deactivated. NCA Director-General, Paarock VanPercy told journalists the deactivated SIMs comprise of 433,246 unregistered ones, and 1,091,645 invalid inactive SIMs. He explained that the unregistered ones are those whose owners have not bothered to go register the SIMs, while the invalid inactive ones are those which have been registered but the registration has some problem, meanwhile the SIMs themselves have not been used for the past three months or more. “Some people have registered their SIMs and their registration is invalid but they can’t also be reached for them to know about the invalidity of their registration because they have not been using the SIM for the past three months or more so they have been deactivated,” he said. He said he personally made calls to the deactivated numbers and can confirm they have indeeded been deactivated. Mr. VanPercy said there is another 3,547,487, which are invalid but are still active so those ones have been given one month to regularize their registration. He said after the one month, the NCA would monitor those numbers weekly to see how fast people are regularizing their registration and those that stay invalid for too long would be deactivated one way, so that they can only receive calls and text messages but they would not be able to make calls or send text messages. The NCA Boss said after sometime, if those deactivated one way still remain invalid, they would then be deactivated completely. He cautioned the public that those already deactivated and those who might be deactivated in the coming weeks would have to go to their network operators and register their SIM with any of the five valid IDs – passport, driver’s license, voter ID, National Health Insurance card or National Identification card. “If you re-register we will have to do verification before we can confirm your registration and that can take one week or more before you can use your number,” he said. But Mr. VanPercy said the NCA is in the process of installing a real-time verification system, which would ensure that registration, verification and activation of SIM card would take a shorter time than usual, adding that it may not be instant but it would be considerably shorter. The NCA however stopped short of saying how many of the deactivated SIM were from each operator. Adom News sent text messages to all the telecom operators seeking their positions on NCA’s plans to order the one way deactivation active invalid SIMs and some said they would oblige, while others said they already have the system in place to do the one way deactivation. Adom News is also reliably informed that some telecom operators are considering court action to prevent the one way deactivation of active invalid SIMs.