TRAI waives off daily cap on computer based SMSes

The telecom ministry took control over unsolicited calls and messages by telemarketers, last year. It began with the 100SMS/day initiative, but later, after carefully considering the feedback it received, raised the bar to 200SMS/day. Besides, TRAI has also been working hard towards delivering quality customer service and also decided that detailed usage data will be provided by the telcos to customers. TRAI has now exempted text messages that are generated by and sent to computers or technical systems from the daily SMS cap, as per reports by TheEconomicTimes. Earlier the cap was put to negate the pesky calls/messages made to customers.

waived off cap for computer generated, sent SMS

Basically, the 200 SMS per day cap has been exempted only in case the device used is not a mobile phone and there is no manual intervention required for answering the message. This is done to enable businesses to send out messages to its employees, wherein the company requires to send information to thousands of employees. This would also help various services, such as taxis booking via radio where the messages need to be sent out to the drivers, firms that need to communicate over the delivery of goods and so on. Also, tentative dates of attending to complaints, the contact details of person attending to the complaint and conditions likewise.

Reportedly, the regulator revealed, "TRAI has received representations that stakeholders are not able to send machine to machine and person to machine SMSes which are sent to initiate process or application for their operational requirements."

When TRAI had enforced the 200 SMS cap, some telemarketers had started using servers overseas. TRAI had later asked telcos to block such violators. TRAI even earned Rs.6 lakhs fine from violators who sent unsolicited messages and did not comply to the new rules set by the ministry. Recently, Nokia was also fined in Australia for sending promotional messages without offering customers the option to unsubscribe. This violated the law and the Finnish firm was fined A$55,000 (approx Rs.2,896,611).