We missed this earlier: The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India on June 3 passed the Telecom Tariff (65th Amendment) Order, 2020, removing a regulation that required telcos to charge customers for sending more than 100 SMS messages per day. Telecom operators had opposed this change, arguing that low SMS pricing could result in an increase in spam messages from unregistered telemarketers. The Railways pushed for this change at an online open house discussion on this subject held by TRAI in May. When Railways employees were using Airtel, the telco wouldn't charge them per SMS when they were sending bulk SMS messages between employees. But after Jio got the Railways contract, it charged them 50 paise per SMS beyond the first hundred texts as required by the TRAI regulation. It's unclear why Airtel and Jio behaved differently here. We have reached out to COAI,…
