Camarines Sur 2nd district Rep. LRay Villafuerte (Facebook)




Camarines Sur 2nd district Rep. LRay Villafuerte hailed authorities on Tuesday, April 25 for heeding his to call to defer the deadline for SIM card registration under Republic Act (RA) No.11934 or the SIM Registration Act. “We welcome this decision to extend the registration deadline by 90 days as this three-month grace period would give the DICT, NTC (National Telecommunications Commission) and PTEs (public telecommunications entities) time to further intensify their list-up drives," he said in a statement. The extension, he said, will also allow government "to fix hitches such as stringent identification requirements, weak or no connectivity and other digital challenges" to the registration of SIM cards. The original deadline for registration was April 26, 2023. As of April 23, the NTC website reported that 82.84 million or 49.31 percent of SIM card owners had signed up. “While we recognize the government’s view that shady characters whose SIMs were the tools in their cybercrimes obviously have neither the desire nor intent to actually register their numbers used in scams and other nefarious activities, we must also consider the position of PTEs pushing a deadline extension that legit SIM owners need to be given more time to register their SIMs and avoid disenfranchisement,” said Villafuerte, majority leader of the powerful Commission on Appointments (CA). “In separately appealing for an extension, the three PTEs—Smart, Globe and DITO—told the DICT and NTC that many legitimate SIM holders have possibly failed to register their SIMs over the four-month sign-up period because of their lack of the required ID (identification) cards for them to list up or because of digital challenges such as the poor connectivity or no Internet at all, especially in what the PTEs have called the ‘missionary’ or faraway places across the country," he said. SIM stands for subscriber identity module. SIM cards are used to avail of network services on electronic devices such as mobile phones. Villafuerte is one of the authors of RA No.11934, which set the SIM card registration window between Dec. 27, 2022 and April 26, 2023. The law, however, provides for an extension of up to 120 days.