To reduce spam calls, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on Tuesday asked telecom operators to disconnect and blacklist telecom resources of unregistered telemarketers and stop voice promotional calls by them to users. The telcos have been asked to disconnect and blacklist such numbers for a period up to two years.
The directions have been issued under the Telecom Commercial Communication Customer Preference Regulations, 2018 regulations.
The regulator has asked telcos to comply immediately with its latest directive and submit regular updates on action taken in this regard on the 1st and 16th of every month.
“…Information regarding blacklisting of the sender shall be shared by the OAP (Originating Access Provider) with all other access providers on DLT (distributed ledger technology) platform, within 24 hours, who will, in turn, disconnect all the telecom resources given by them to that sender within the next 24 hours,” Trai said.
New telecom resources would not be allocated to them by any access provider during the period of blacklisting, according to Trai’s directions.
Last week, Trai had warned that telcos will disconnect the telecom resources of entities that are found misusing bulk connections for making spam calls, and such entities would face blacklisting by all operators for up to two years.
Trai also held a meeting with regulatory heads of all the Telecom Service Providers last Thursday.