The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on Saturday extended the deadline on the SMS traceability guidelines for telecom operators to December 10 from November 30.
The new system requires certain technical tweaks from telemarketers that involves defining principal entity (PE)-Telemarketers (TMs) chain, based on which the telecom operators will be able to trace the messages. In absence of the same, the telemarketers will be blocked from sending the messages.
The new system is being introduced to curb the menace of spam messages and directly tracing the defaulters who are responsible for such unsolicited communication.
Trai has extended the deadline after assessing the progress of PE-TM chain declaration and on request from telecom operators. Earlier, Trai extended the deadline to November 30 from November 1.
In a communication to Trai, telecom operators earlier said that while they are technically ready for implementation of the traceability of messages, there could be challenges which may be faced at the end of the principal entities and the telemarketers to register their complete chain on the DLT (distributed ledger technology) platform. The same could also lead to disruption of critical messages.
Trai, however, said that more than 27,000 PEs have already registered their chains with the respective Access Providers and further registration is in progress at a rapid pace. Lately, Trai also clarified that the rules won’t cause any disruption in OTP messages.
“Access Providers have sent and are continuing to send warning notices to all PEs and TMs who have not yet implemented necessary changes,” Trai said in a release.
The regulator said with effect from December 11, any traffic (messages) where the chain of telemarketers is not defined or does not match with a pre-defined chain shall be rejected.
“PEs and TMs are again advised to expedite the declaration of chains on priority as any message that fails to adhere to the traceability regulation will be rejected with effect from 11th of December 2024,” it added.
“All the Principal Entities (PE) and Telemarketers (TM) shall complete the PE-TM chain binding at the earliest to avoid disruption in the transmission of messages,” Trai said in a notification, directing the telecom operators to ensure the same.
So far, telecom operators have also been submitting a daily progress report regarding messages that are complying to or failing to comply with the chain-binding process for traceability.
