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The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Tuesday has further suspended the Unsolicited Commercial Communication (UCC) norms to enable principal entities (PEs/ telemarketers) to register the template of SMS with telecom service providers (TSPs).
However, the regulator has not specified the time period for the suspension.
On March 17, TRAI had suspended the UCC norms for seven days sighting disruptions to several services and transactions such as net banking, credit card payments, and rail ticket bookings as SMS and one-time passwords (OTPs) could not be generated on customers’ devices, with TSPs implementing the new rules for unwanted commercial messages, called scrubbing.
"Unfortunately, despite of repeated communication, all major banks and big telemarketers sending SMS have failed to fulfil regulatory requirements. All are being notified individually also. TRAI has called for further reports from TSPs," TRAI said in a statement.
More data sought
According to a senior official, the banks have requested for more time and therefore, TRAI has asked for more granular data before setting a date.
"We have roped in other regulators and government organisations too. Apart from notifying the defaulters through TSPs, TRAI is writing to defaulters -- both to PEs and aggregators -- and telemarketers," the official told BusinessLine .
In compliance with provisions of the regulations, when SMS scrubbing was activated by the Access Providers from March 8, some failure of A2P SMS traffic was observed. It was observed that some of the PEs have not fulfilled the requirements as envisaged in Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations, 2018 ("TCCCPR, 2018), even after two years, despite being fully aware of the regulations and the consequences, TRAI said.
"In order to protect the interest of consumers, TRAI had to request TSPs to temporarily suspend the scrubbing of SMS for seven days to enable the principal entities to register the template of SMS so that no inconvenience is faced by the customers," it mentioned.
Regulatory compliance
Thereafter, since March 17, access providers has activated the content template scrubbing. However, to avoid inconvenience to the public, traffic is being allowed to pass for the time being, even if it is not fulfilling the regulatory requirements, it further said.
Major reasons observed for not meeting the regulatory compliance are content template not registered, content Id missing, mismatch in template registered and message sent.
"TRAI once again requests all the entities who are using the telecom resources to send bulk messages to the consumers, to fulfil the regulatory requirements immediately so that there would not be any disruption in the communication to the customers," it added.
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