Trai’s New Rules on Curbing Pesky Calls and Messages Will Involve Rs 200-400 Crore Investment: COAI

The mobile industry body, COAI, today stated that Trai’s new rules on curbing pesky calls and messages saying tailoring of systems and use of blockchain technology will involve Rs 200 to Rs 400 crore investment and 18 months of time would be required for the final roll out. The Cellular Operators’ Association of India (COAI) represents the voice of large telecom operators in the country, all of who would be required to comply with these rules by December. At the moment, the telecom industry is financially stressed, and there isn’t much time given by Trai to the operators.

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“As this system has not been implemented elsewhere in the world, it is difficult to quantify the exact investment or the time involved. But roughly, it will be in excess of Rs 200-400 crore investments for tailoring of the system,” COAI Director General Rajan S Mathews told reporters of PTI.

Even the December timeline is “extremely unfeasible” for customising the system to comply the new rules, Mathews said adding that at least 1-1.5 years would be needed to put the full system architecture in place.

On whether the increased cost of compliance will be passed on by operators to the consumers in the form of higher tariffs, Mathews said that generally costs tend to get passed on, but in this case, it would depend entirely on market dynamics.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) last month came out with stringent unsolicited commercial communication rules under which an individual can revoke permission that they have granted to any commercial entity for a service.

The mandated granularity in customer preferences also permits subscribers to set preference about days and time bands on which they would like to receive commercial communications as well as indicate preferred modes of communication – call or SMS.