Following up on its promise of curbing unsolicited SMS and calls, which continue to be a major problem even after the imposition of the SMS Spam Guidelines, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has issued a new directive, asking all telecom providers to take additional measures for controlling SMS spam. The TRAI has asked telcos to: - Put a price restraint on sending more than one hundred SMS per day per SIM at a concessional rate. This essentially means that a subscriber is free to send SMSs beyond 100 in a day, however, all SMSs sent beyond one hundred SMS per day per SIM, shall be charged at a rate not lower than fifty paise. The TRAI has given 15 days to telcos for implementing it. - To restrict unregistered telemarketers from sending bulk promotional SMSs using software applications, Access Providers have been mandated to put in place, within three months, a solution, which will ensure that no commercial SMSs are sent containing same or similar characters or strings or variants from any source or number. The solution will ensure that not more than 200 SMSs with such similar ‘signature’ are sent in an hour. However, registered telemarketers, transactional message sending entities and telephone numbers exempted by the Authority are excluded from this provision. Normal consumers sending non-commercial SMSs will also not be affected by this measure. - The lodging of a complaint against an unregistered telemarketer call has also been made easier. Now the complaint can be registered through SMS by simply forwarding the spam SMS to 1909 after…
