After suspending SMS scrubbing by telecom companies for a week, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Tuesday said the process will resume from Wednesday, but assured that messages will reach customers even if they do not match with the template registered on the blockchain systems of the telecom service providers (TSPs).
In a letter, TRAI said telcos have to create reports daily on the percentage of SMS traffic that failed in the scrubbing process, and that there will be review of the whole process again on March 23, 2021.
On March 8, when the SMS scrubbing came into effect, several services faced massive disruption as customers did not receive critical SMSes, such as OTP to complete transactions or net banking.
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The disruption was of a massive scale, with one of the leading SMS aggregators Kalreya for enterprises in the country reporting that over 100-120 million messages, on their platform, failed on Monday.
The issue was of "SMS scrubbing" which was undertaken by telecom companies as per the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations (TCCCPR).
Telecom companies have been asked to implement a distributed ledger technology, or a blockchain system, where all enterprises which send messages to customers, including critical SMSes, such as OTPs sent by banks, communication messages and promotional messages, have to register their entity, the SMS header and the content template.
If there is even a slight mismatch in the content, the message will not be delivered.
However, TRAI has for the time being allowed messages to reach customers even if the content template is not registered, if the content ID is missing, or if there is a mismatch in the template registered and the messages offered for delivery.
The regulator, however, has asked entities and telemarketers to ensure compliance to the prescribed procedures while submitting bulk messages to the TSPs.
(Edited by : Jomy)
First Published: Mar 16, 2021 7:51 PM IST
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