The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) will soon be holding a meeting with all the mobile operators to explore ways of checking unsolicited commercial messages being sent to subscribers by tele-marketing firms through web servers located outside the country.
The regulator’s proposed meeting with the operators assumes significance because its entire effort at checking unsolicited messages by bringing in strict guidelines has gone awry with the tele-marketers routing such messages through international web servers. It now wants to check with the operators how such messages routed through foreign servers can be stopped.
Such messages which originate with international telephone codes such as +44 have posed a serious challenge for the mobile phone operators who say that they don’t have the wherewithal to weed them out since these messages originate abroad on individual numbers, simply sending out messages to a large group of people.
?We know that tele-marketers need to send out at least 1,000 messages for a viable business case and so we had limited the number of messages to 200 per day but sending messages through international servers allows them to send out as many messages as they like, ? a Trai official explained.
While the regulator has put severe punishments including a hefty fine of close to Rs 2.5 lakh and a threat of canceling the SIM number in case the registered tele-marketers don’t comply with the regulations issued by the regulator it is unregistered tele-marketers who have been wreaking havoc with the regulator’s guidelines.
A message from a registered tele-marketer carry a header such as ‘TM J_dial’ rather than displaying a mobile number whereas messages routed through international servers display a number beginning with the international code of that country.