ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has extended the deadline for mobile phone users to register their cellular devices with the authority.
PTA has warned that illegal, smuggled and unregistered devices will not work after January 15, a private news channel reported on Saturday. To register your cellular device, you have to send your IMEI number via SMS to 8484. You can check your IMEI number by dialing *#06#. In response, PTA will send a reply confirming whether your phone is compliant. In October, Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry had announced that the government had decided to crackdown against smugglers of mobile phones in Pakistan. Fawad Chaudhry had said the government had devised a framework to block illegal imports of mobile phones by the end of this year.

“By this year’s end, [all] smuggled phones in the country will stop being operational,” he had said.  According to statistics released by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), the number of mobile phone users in the country reached 151 million by July 2018. The number of mobile broadband subscribers was around 60 million during the same period. By 2017, over 30 percent of Pakistan’s population was covered by the 4G network. The country saw a dramatic increase in mobile broadband penetration over the past five years, with market penetration increasing from below one percent in 2012 to 24 percent in 2017, an IT official was quoted as saying earlier this year.