Synopsis
ET had, in its March 9 edition, reported about the disruption caused to several online services because of the inability of telemarketers and others to register their sender IDs and context of texts on the blockchain platform of telcos.
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According to sources aware of the matter, the overall commercial SMS drop rate came down to 33% on Tuesday from 40% the day before.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on Tuesday suspended the implementation of its regulation to control pesky messages for a week, a day after a host of services and transactions such as net banking, online railway ticket bookings, ecommerce sales and Aadhaar authentication were disrupted as SMSes and OTPs failed to arrive.
Several online services witnessed disruption on Monday as telemarketers and others were unable to register their sender IDs and context of texts on the blockchain platform of telcos.
March 9, 2021
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has deferred the implementation of its SMS ‘scrubbing’ blockchain system by 7 days. In a press release published on Tuesday, TRAI deferred the implementation of the system after several complaints emerged from Monday morning onward that one-time passcodes (OTP) and other important transactional messages were getting blocked from delivery.
Under the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations, 2018 telcos have created a blockchain system in order to reduce fraudulent SMS deliveries. As part of the implementation of this system, banks, payment companies, government entities and other merchants sending SMS’ had to their customers had to register their specific SMS format with telemarketers and telcos. While the telcos went live with the system on Sunday at midnight, many merchants had not registered leading to OTPs and other messages getting blocked.
TRAI suspends new rules to get bulk messengers in line
March 09, 2021
In a breather for bulk message senders, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Tuesday said it was suspending the Unsolicited Commercial Communication (UCC) norms for seven days to enable principal entities (PEs) register the template of SMS with telecom service providers (TSPs).
The development follows disruptions to several services and transactions such as net banking, credit card payments, and rail ticket bookings on Monday 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.
Responding to the outages felt across banking and e-commerce services, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has put on hold implementation of its regulations to curb unsolicited commercial communication. Users failed to receive text messages including one time passwords for online transactions , and banks attributed the glitches to Trai’s new regulations which came into effect on Monday. The regulator has now given service providers another week to adhere to the norms, though banks and payment gateway firms said on Tuesday that 60-70 per cent of their messages were delivered to customers.
Trai regulations were introduced in 2018 and a framework was put in place to protect customers from fraud and phishing. Under these regulations, companies which send messages are registered and the messages are verified by telecom companies using a block chain-based solution. Text messages from unregistered sender IDs or headers are blocked.