Telcos oppose personal SIM registration

MANILA, Philippines —  The government will only slow down the process of SIM registration if it mandates face-to-face appearance to validate an individual’s ID, the country’s largest telcos have warned.

The Philippine Chamber of Telecommunication Operators (PCTO) is opposed to the proposal of the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) to demand personal appearance — similar to how driver’s license is obtained — for SIM registration.

PCTO vice president Roy Ibay warned that turning SIM registration into a manual process could slow the growth of telcos’ subscriber bases.

“There is this issue of making the entire process shift to offline to do a face-to-face procedure. I think that will gravely slow down the entire process,” Ibay said.

Instead, Ibay urged NTC to set up dedicated hubs in select areas where SIMs can be enlisted if the online registration portal is down. The hubs can also be accessed by individuals who struggle to validate the IDs they are uploading online.

However, Ibay said to fully turn SIM registration into a face-to-face procedure may be hard to do financially and logistically.

“Probably, there can be face-to-face (registration) if there has been a technical problem in terms of registering online and also if the ID used has an issue,” Ibay said.

“However, to across-the-board state that from now on the process will now be face-to-face even if, say, there is no problem in the submission of registration, that would severely be a challenge for telcos in terms of physical channels to be set up for that,” he added.

The PCTO believes that the government instead can come up with an ID database that telcos can turn to when validating the authenticity of a registrant. This way, telcos can vet the identity of an individual without having to require them to show up personally.

The NTC is pushing for various changes in Republic Act 11934, or the SIM Registration Act, to include some learnings since its passage in 2022. One of the proposed amendments is to mandate personal appearance to fight fake IDs and improve the integrity of verification.

The agency earlier asked Congress to grant it authority to limit the number of SIM ownership per individual to minimize the opportunity for fraudsters to acquire multiple accounts.

The SIM Registration Act enforces sanctions of up to six years in jail and as much as P300,000 in fines to anyone found selling registered SIMs.