Telecom operators throughout India have been requested by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) to renew the blocking of non-compliant bulk business SMS messages once more. The en masse blocking of bulk SMS will begin once more from April 1, in a bid to chop down on phishing scams and different fraudulent entities that had been utilizing the pretext of pretend business providers to dupe customers. However, after an preliminary spherical of blocking earlier in March, many customers had did not obtain OTPs of banking transactions on their telephones, resulting in quite a few complaints from customers of all fronts.
However, this time, such an OTP outage shouldn’t be anticipated to happen. According to a Financial Express report, the principal entities (PEs) who use business bulk SMS providers, comparable to banks and different providers that make use of SMS-based OTPs for login verification, have claimed success charges of as much as 98 % in delivering SMS messages based mostly on the brand new, TRAI-prescribed SMS format. However, telecom operators nonetheless declare that loads of providers are nonetheless non-compliant to the brand new format, and subsequently, there could also be some service outage when the necessary blocking is applied beginning April 1.
The Indian telecom regulatory physique has mandated the use of blockchain-based Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) earlier this yr. DLT specifies using a mandated format of textual content for authorised business messages, and all PEs comparable to banks had been subsequently mandated to replace their messaging providers in accordance to this format. However, many events had seemingly did not adjust to this, as was revealed in March.
In a letter addressed to telcos on March 31, the TRAI stated, “SMS of few PEs are getting rejected because of variable character length more than 30 characters and also due to variation in text submitted for delivery from the text registered at the time of content templates. The reason of variation in the text is told to be due to variation of text across multiple sources of the same PE. All PEs are required to meet these requirements, in case of non-compliance, their messages are liable to be rejected.”
Matching of static textual content throughout bulk messages, coupled with a stringent restrict of 30 variable characters are two key parts which can be designed to restrict spam throughout business SMS providers. However, studies counsel that the prevalent use of various SMS codecs throughout totally different departments of the identical PE might have additionally been the basis reason behind disruption of normal SMS providers. Starting as we speak, banks will hope to have matched the really useful codecs with a view to keep away from repeated failures in supply of essential communication.
