TRAI Suspends New Regulation On SMS After Bank OTP Services Get Affected

Several banks approached TRAI as they were unable to send SMSes and one-time passwords (OTPs) which impacted important services such as online transactions.

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New Delhi: The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has temporarily suspended its new rules for curbing spam messages as their implementation that began on Monday led to chaos.

Several banks approached TRAI as they were unable to send SMSes and one-time passwords (OTPs) which impacted important services such as net banking, online transactions, credit card payments, bookings and more. The regulation has been put on hold for a week.

The Telecom Commercial Communication Customer Preference Regulation was issued in July 2018 to “effectively deal with the nuisance of spam".

It prohibits unregistered senders from initiating commercial messages and registered companies are prevented from sending fraudulent messages to customers.

In a statement on Tuesday, TRAI stated that telcos implemented the norms but some companies did not adopt them or get registered - causing chaos with text messages being dropped and transaction failures.

It was reported that companies and government bodies were facing issues because they did not register their content template until March 7 despite reminders.

Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd, Bharti Airtel Ltd and Vodafone Idea Ltd are informed to be COAI members.

“TSPs (telecom service providers) are following Trai regulations and have activated the due process of content scrubbing to address the issue of unsolicited commercial communication. TSPs have sent various communications to the principal entities to register their content template with TSPs before 7 March," S.P. Kochhar, director general, Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) said.

“We request all principal entities to get their content template registered with TSPs and help address the issue of unsolicited commercial communication," he added.