Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea caution TRAI of ‘OTP blackouts’ if SMS tracing deadline not extended
Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea have warned against major disruptions in delivering service updates and transaction alerts to customers starting November 1. This comes after the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) introduced new rules in August this year, requiring all messages to be traceable to their source. While the regulation aims to enhance message accountability, operators caution that it could severely impact their ability to send important notifications like bank transactions, delivery updates, and account alerts to users.According to a report by Economic Times, the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), which has Jio, Airtel and Vodafone Idea as its members, has written to TRAI seeking relaxations for implementing the mandate on traceability.
What the telcos say
In August, TRAI issued a new directive affecting how businesses communicate with customers. Under these rules, starting November, telecom companies must verify the complete chain of delivery for all messages sent by principal entities (PEs) like banks, e-commerce companies, and financial institutions. Any message where the sequence of telemarketers cannot be clearly traced or doesn’t match records must be blocked. This effectively means that communications without a fully documented delivery path will not reach customers.
The telecom operators are claiming that messages containing OTPs and other critical activities may not be delivered as telemarketers and PEs are yet to implement the technical solution. They have informed the telecom operators that telemarketers and PEs need more time to complete activities at their end. PEs are pushing for a two-month deadline extension to complete the activity.
To minimize service disruptions and customer inconvenience, telecom operators said that they will provide daily reports to telemarketers and PEs, allowing them to fix any compliance issues. While the traceability rules take effect in November, telecom companies will begin actually blocking non-compliant messages from December 1.
This is the second time that the telecom industry has sought a one-month extension to meet TRAI’s mandate concerning commercial messages. Earlier, the regulator had extended the deadline for whitelisting of messages containing URLs, OTT links etc by a month till October 1. The telcos then requested more time to set up the systems.
