So someone's finally doing something about the TRAI's restrictive SMS caps: The Delhi High Court has issued notices to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) and the central government questioning TRAI's cap of 200 SMSes per day per SIM, after a petition challenging the order was filed by Anil Kumar, secretary of an NGO, Telecom Watchdog, reports The Economic Times. The petition also alleged that the checks and measures under the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations, 2010, were already enough to tackle the menace of unsolicited SMS's and the SMS cap has been imposed in a non-transparent manner without any prior consultation with the stakeholders. The SMS spam regulations finally saw the light of the day on September 27, 2011, following which the regulator capped the outgoing SMS at 100 SMS's per day per SIM, which was subsequently extended to allow 200 SMS per day per SIM and an additional charge of 5 paise was levied on promotional SMS. We have always said that the regulator's decision to limit the number of peer to peer SMSs was not required. We do not understand why the TRAI feels that the move will limit spam, when in fact spammers have discovered other alternatives including using servers and numbers located outside India for the same purpose. It only ended up affecting the end-consumer who uses SMS as a means of communication. Also, other counter measures such as limiting bulk SMS special tariffs were sufficient to discourage non-registered spammers. Nikhil adds: The problem is as much with the SMS limit, which…
