Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) goes big time to curb the menance of unsolicitated messages, it has yet again amended the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations 2012 act; and a minimum of fifty paise will be applicable for SMSes exceeding 100 per day per SIM.
According to the 'The Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference (Tenth Amendment) Regulations, 2012 and Telecommunication Tariff (Fifty Fourth Amendment) Order, 2012,' service prividers will have to deploy a solution to track the SMSes having similar characters or strings or variants from any source or number and it will restrict it to 200 SMSes with such similar ‘signatureâ€TM are sent in an hour. "However, registered telemarketers, transactional message sending entities and telephone numbers exempted by the Authority are excluded from this provision. Normal consumers sending non-commercial SMSs will also not be affected by this measure," said TRAI.
TRAI ha directed access providers to set up a web-based complaint registering system and a dedicated e-mail address to receive complaints on UCC. They will also have to keep customers informed about the consequences of misuse and advise customers not to send any commercial communications, through SMS on a periodic basis.
TRAI has taken a series of measures in the recent past for curbing the menace of unsolicited messages. It issued “The Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations, 2010†on 1st December 2010, which came into force from 27th September 2011. Subsequently, for addressing the operational issues and for tightening the regulatory framework, a number of amendments have been issued to the principal regulations besides issue of a number of directions.