Through its letter on Tuesday, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has asked the telcos to start filtering the SMSes from March 17, 2021. However, the regulator has asked the telcos not to block any message even if it doesn’t comply with the necessary template rules. According to an ET Telecom report, businesses won’t have to worry about facing message blocking issues for now. The last time the regulator implemented the rule, around 400 million messages, including important SMSes such as OTPs and more, were blocked. Thus, this news will come as a major relief for the companies/businesses, which, for some reason, couldn’t implement and comply with the new SMS regimes.
SMS Filtering to Go On and Everything Must be Recorded
Trai has asked the telcos to continue monitoring the messages. It said that regardless of the content, deliver the message but record any shortfalls of the message in complying with the new template. The telcos will be using blockchain technology to scrub the messages. All the content of the SMS will be filtered using pre-registered templates. Further, the telcos will have to make a summary of all the data recorded, which then needs to be submitted to the authority two times a week. It is worth noting that the telcos have been filtering the messages since the last week. While they stopped blocking the messages, SMS filtering has been going on. This is done so that the individual companies not following the SMS template rules can be helped with implementing it on their system. The operators have already listed around 1.2 million white SMS templates, and if they are able to identify 3,00,000 more, there will be 100% SMS traffic complying with the new template rules. The regulator and the operators are in quite a hurry to implement the new SMS system. This is because of the order passed by the Delhi High Court that doesn’t want to see any more delays.
