The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has suspended the SMS regulations on Tuesday, which came into effect just a day before. Because of the SMS regulations, a ton of SMSes carrying important data such as Railways ticket bookings, OTPs, Aadhar authentication, and more weren’t being delivered to the customers. To ensure that the end customer doesn’t have to pay for the relaxed behaviour of businesses on implementing the new SMS template, the telecom regulator has relaxed the rules for seven days (one week).
Time for Businesses to Gear Up and Implement the New SMS System Fast
According to an ET Telecom report, the telcos have switched off the new SMS filtration system on Tuesday. This will give the ignorant businesses time to implement the new SMS system fast so that no more SMSes they send gets blocked in the future.
Some of the industry executives said that large businesses with advanced IT mechanisms are catching with the new system, but for the small businesses, it is getting hard since the SMS content is very dynamic in nature.
For the unaware, Trai had issued the regulations on unsolicited commercial communication in 2018, but the rules came into effect on Monday only. According to the regulation, the content of every SMS must be verified by the telcos before it is delivered to the customers.
For doing the same, the telcos have deployed a blockchain solution that will check the header, sender ID, and content of every SMS that originates from a verified/registered source. The SMSes which come from unregistered IDs will be directly blocked.
This system is put into place to ensure that SMS frauds in India can be contained and reduced as quickly as possible. All the entities that haven’t registered and implemented the new SMS system will have to do so in the seven day period to ensure that their SMSes does not get blocked by the operators.
