Yesterday, a host of services and transactions such as net banking, credit caed payments, railway ticket bookings, e connerce services, Asdhar authentications and even Co win vaccinations registrations were disrupted, as SMSs and OTPs failed to arrive. This was basically due to telephone operators implemented a new set of regulations for commercial text messages.
Now what is the actual issue- Though Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) was able to contain the problems of pesky calls and unwanted SMS with Do not disturb (DND) registry, but this was not entirely successful. Users of telecom services continue to suffer unwanted communication from telemarketers, especially such marketers who are not even registered to provide such service.
Telecommunication services have greatly reduced the cost for initiating and maintaining communication, whether through SMS, phone call, messaging or email. While this is generally welcome, it has set the price for making unsolicited commercial communication (spam) so low that subscribers are constantly bombarded with it. Are there rules to protect the subscriber? TRAI has brought out Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations, 2010 and has followed it up with 16 amendments to fine tune the process for subscribers to record their preferences and for the Telecom Service Providers to take action on any complaints. The registered telemarketers have to abide by the regulations and are, therefore, careful about respecting the customers’ wishes. They are not to send promotional UCC message, but may send messages that are transactional in nature, such as for banks to remind you about EMI instalment or send OTP, and for the online merchants to send you messages about progress of shipment to you, etc. In case a DND subscriber receives purely promotional messages in the guise of transactional messages (that come with an alpha only header), the customer may lodge a complaint with their telecom service provider.
Such complaints, once proven, lead to severe action under the regulations. Another class of spam originates from Unregistered Telemarketers. These calls or messages come from 10 digit numbers given to ordinary subscribers, but contain UCC. You may complain about such calls or messages too, and they lead to disconnection of the number. The reported violations (of registered or unregistered telemarketers) are investigated by the Telecom Service Providers (TSP) and the user receives a message advising him or her of the action taken, and if not satisfied, there is an option to escalate the dispute to Appellate Level with the TSP.
Even without your complaints, the majority of these messages are filtered by the service provider so you never get to see them, much like the server-side spam control in most popular email systems. Hundreds of millions of messages are trapped for your convenience each month. But some do bypass the filters, unfortunately. Mechanism for Allowing or Disallowing a communication The consumer of telecommunication services are provided several methods for recording their preferences in the DND registry and also for making their complaints.
TRAI asked telcos to use blockchain technology to reduce pesky and unwanted commercial messages and calls and mandated subscriber consent to receive telemarketing messages. According to TRAI’s latest regulation on unsolicited commercial communications, which were issued in 2018 but implemented yesterday, telcos must verify every SMS content with a registered text before delivering it. The blockchain based solution deployed by telcom operators checks the sender ID, called the header, and content of every commercial SMS originating from a registered source SMSs from unregistered sender IDs are simply blocked.
So yesterday being the first day of these new rules, saw transactaions services across the board being disrupted including Unified Payments Interface (UPI), Aadhar enabled payments, net banking and credit card payments due to lack of registration of sender ID and content.
So it seems till all message senders IDs are registered with all telecos till that time this problem will be persisting.
Waiting for your views and comments.
Anil Malik
Mumbai, India
9th March 2021v