Biometric SIM registration begins Dec 16
Overcoming all difficulties through trial and errors during piloting, the government is set to start biometric SIM registration officially on December 16, the Victory Day of Bangladesh.
"The problems that appeared during the trial process have been minimized so we could run the official SIM registration using biometric system from December 16 smoothly," State Minister for Post and Telecommunications Tarana Halim said.
Bangladesh as the second country has taken the initiative to introduce the human body-based indentifying system to ensure the ownership of cellular phone number to curb telephony crimes.
The process will be launched at a ceremony at Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) at 10:30 am.
On November 15, all the cellular phone operators started the trial of the registration system at its customer care centers by installing biometric verification devices which are linked with the national identity card database of Election Commission (EC). But, the biometric verification witnessed mismatch between the subscribers` fingerprints taken at their customer centers and those stored in the NID database.
Fingerprint, generally thumbprint, generates a unique binary code that is stored in the EC`s NID database and when the subscribers verify that, the machines in the operators` outlet should produce the same binary code.
When those two codes mismatch, the thumbprint verification shows negative result.
About the errors, Tarana Halim said, "Initially, there were some problems which we did not expect. But, later we had been able to solve those."
She said sometimes they found that entry of national identity card number during the process was not completed correctly, rather one or two digit were excluded mistakenly that`s why there were some unsuccessful results. But, they thought it happened for mismatching fingerprint, added Tarana.
"During the piloting, evaluating different kinds of feedback from the operators and election commission, all the problems have been solved. Now, we are ready to run it," the state minister said.
Prime Minister`s ICT Affairs Adviser Sajeeb Wazed Joy inaugurated trial on October 22 by registering a SIM of state-owned Teletalk for himself through giving fingerprint.
Currently, Bangladesh has six mobile phone operators including Teletalk. The other five are Grameenphone, Robi, Airtel, Banglalink and Citycell.
According to BTRC, more than 130 million of Bangladesh`s 160 million people had mobile phone SIMs until August this year. Of them, 52.5 million had internet connections.
