Sunday, April 11, 2010

The Future of My Cell Phone

Yesterday I registered my cell phone with Mexico's new federal database, which was the last possible day before service was to be cut off. In theory means that I'm in the clear, but I got a text message urging me to register my phone this morning, and saying that I'd been granted a 24-hour reprieve, so who knows.

According to news reports, about a third of the country's cell phone users haven't registered with the database, which means that either today or tomorrow or sometime in the near future, some 25 million cell phones are going to be cut off. That will mean 25 million very angry Mexicans, as well as (and probably more significantly for the politicians) a handful of very angry cell phone providers. The tone of a news message I received through a Telcel service earlier this week offered some indication of the companies' feeling on the matter:
Without precedent: By law [the government] will cancel a public service to more than 25 million cell phone users.

2 comments:

Mexfiles said...

25 million TELEPHONE NUMBERS doesn't add up to 25 million USERS. I have had at least five phones go missing over the years, and never bothered to cancel the number (which is presumably still floating around) and people tend not to change the chip when they upgrade from the cheap TelCel "kit" phones, but just get a whole new phone and number. And when they move. I don't think this is going to be nearly the huge disruption we think.

pc said...

Yeah true enough, I'd not thought enough about that. I've had three chips now, and I imagine the numbers on the other chips are still part of the 83 million total.