Telecom Companies have urged the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) to extend the deadline by a month and proceed with the blocking thing by December 1.  

Why is Extension required? 

The TRAI has been told that although the telcos are ready with the arrangements required to comply with the traceability guidelines, the Principal Entities like Banks, e-commerce platforms, etc, and the telemarketers still need some more time to fully ensure the technical compliance mandated in the guidelines. 

Which services are to be affected? 

The telcos have cautioned the TRAI to not proceed completely with the blocking approach as the consumers won't be able to receive OTP and other important messages from Banks, e-commerce, financial institutions, etc. This is because the telemarketers are yet to comply with the technical requirements mandated for the traceability mechanism. 

What is the Compliance? 

The TRAI had directed Telcos to verify all the messages being delivered to the consumers on the mechanism of Traceability, back in August. It means the messages for which the chain of telemarketers is not available with the Telcos or doesn't match their records, will be blocked from delivering to the end user. 

In the Indian telecom scenario, nearly 1.5 billion commercial messages are delivered every day. Any nastiness in implementing the guidelines would have a very high impact on the functioning of the entire delivery system resulting in a complete failure of objectives.   

Compliances Needed

To comply with regulations, all message headers and content templates registered on DLT (distributed ledger technology) must follow the established guidelines. Furthermore, each content template can only be linked to one header.

Proposed Solution 

The telcos, through the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), have urged the TRAI to relax the implementation of the concerned regulations. The PEs and telemarketers need to fully comply with the guidelines to ensure proper scrubbing coupled with minimal impact on the messages, both at the same time. 

For this, the industry has suggested following a “logger mode” wherein the messages won’t be fully blocked in case of a mismatch, non-registrant instances, or any other reason. Under this, the telcos would send daily reports to the PEs and telemarketers to enable corrective steps. Eventually, the telcos would proceed with complete blocking by December 1. 

Safe and Secure Ecosystem 

Through this, TRAI aims to address the issue of spam and unsafe telecom ecosystem. TRAI has even taken various steps to curb the misuse of headers and content templates to ensure safety protocols for the end consumer. It had even requested the Telcos, last week itself, to disengage the resources of unregistered telemarketers.