Poland deactivates an estimated 12m unused SIM cards

Poland’s telecoms regulator, the Office for Electronic Communications (UKE), has switched off an estimated twelve million unregistered pre-paid mobile SIM cards. A report from RPKom quotes the watchdog as saying that 68.7% of all issued SIM cards had been registered by the 2 February deadline. Users whose accounts have been affected can still have their services restored by registering their details with their operator. While almost a third of issued SIM cards have reportedly been deactivated, it is thought that the exercise will have little effect on the user totals reported by operators, as most firms only give numbers for active subscribers. The last big cull by a major Polish telco was carried out by T-Mobile in the third quarter of 2015, at which date it deactivated 3.84 million unused accounts.