On August 17th, Govt of India banned all “Bulk SMS” and MMS services for 15 days across the country to curb spread of rumors which has led to exodus of North Eastern people from certain parts of country by issuing directive to all mobile service operators.

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While the ban was on “Bulk SMS” it soon became apparent that the ban did not intend to restrict only BULK sms but also all SMS sent from individual SIM cards, once the count of SMS exceeded 5 text messages per day per SIM.

It has been just 2 days since this restrictive order, however it has already created huge confusion among operators and has impacted almost all prepaid subscriber (more than 90% of total mobile users) in India.

The Directive to Ban Bulk SMS and MMS clearly asking all mobile operators not to allow mobile phone users to send more than five SMSs or MMSs in Bulk or at one go over the next 15 days (as we shared in earlier post) but many operators have interpreted it as “Not more than 5 SMS per day per SIM card”, which has in turn ended up creating huge communication hurdles for many prepaid mobile service consumers across all circles.

At TelecomTalk we were flooded with Email, Calls, Tweets and comments on posts regarding this SMS Ban. We also got customer feed back from all circles across India from our esteem active readers, many postpaid subscriber had no problem sending as many SMSs as they wanted to at one go while many prepaid customers were barred from sending more than 5 SMSs during the day even some reported that they cant even send one sms.