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Few days ago, Will wrote about plans of the Mexican government to kill millions of cellphone lines in an anti-crime initiative. Well that ain’t gonna go that easy as we have the country’s regulator, Cofetel, extending the deadline for the prepaid mobile phone user registration. The reason is obvious – operators reacted, in a fear of losing millions of dollars in revenues.
The regulator said it will “allow operators to eliminate the latter phase of the registration process being handled by their technical teams and at the same time will give preference to processing applications received starting today.”
Last Saturday, almost 1.5 million Mexicans registered their prepaid phone numbers, bringing the number of registered users to 58.3 million, or about 70% of all phones in the country.
The question is whether this can help Mexico in its crime-fighting activities. It could help, though it’s important to add criminals could always register phones under other people’s identities, making the measure obsolete.
And for the record, Mexico’s two largest mobile operators, America Movil and Telefonica, tried unsuccessfully to have the deadline for disconnections extended by one year to April 2011.
[Via: MobileBusinessBriefing]
About The Author
Dusan Belic
Dusan has been using smartphones since their introduction and is now following the latest trends in the industry. The "convergence" is what he's most excited about, and writing about it is the next logical thing to do. He thinks that using a smartphone is what everyone who cares about their time should do. In addition to his interests in mobile phones, Dusan also loves to experiment with the latest web and mobile 2.0 services. The idea of accessing and managing your information from any device no matter where you are simply amazes him. Whether it's an online to-do list, note taking service or a video sharing social network, he's there to try it out. He admits though, he's still searching for the ultimate web-based organizational tool, which "sings" perfectly with the mobile PIM application. Dusan used to run SymbianWatch.com which later became part of IntoMobile. He lives in Serbia, South-East Europe, from where he edits the site on a daily basis.
