The aim is to help subscribers distinguish between genuine commercial calls and promotional ones.
The department of telecommunications (DoT) has given its go-ahead to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s (Trai) proposal to assign a different series of phone numbers to companies for service-related commercial calls, which are not for promotional purposes.
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The aim is to help subscribers distinguish between genuine commercial calls and promotional ones.
At present, amid an increase in spam and fraudulent calls, subscribers refrain from taking calls even from their banks, which may be for service-related information or assistance, or from product servicing companies.
The phone number series will be issued to principal entities (businesses like banks) based on their requirement, for which Trai will soon come up with guidelines, officials said. The new series will work as an identifier for them and will be displayed on phone screens at the time of the call.
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Currently, the ‘140’ number series has been issued to telemarketing companies, but there’s no distinction between firms delivering services and making a sales pitch for pure commercial purposes.
Meanwhile, Trai has given more time to telecom operators and principal entities to implement its earlier directions to stop misuse of headers and message templates. The regulator has not made any formal announcement in this regard, but the compliance will take at least two to three weeks, officials said. Thy said it is an ongoing process and the regulator will conduct another meeting with telcos next week to check on the progress.
In February, Trai directed telcos to block all unverified and unused headers and templates within 30 days and 60 days, respectively. Based on the order, the deadline to comply with the directions for telcos is April 16. However, banking and financial institutions, which constitute the majority of the spam and fraudulent messages, have delayed complying with the directions. The delay on their part was because fiscal year closure related business. They had sought time till April-end.
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Telcos only own the network and promotional messages are sent by enterprises through telemarketers. Last month, Trai asked the telcos to expedite the implementation on the directions from principal entities or enterprises for removing their unused message templates and headers.
Telecom operators had informed Trai that only 7-8% of the principal entities have complied with the directions on cleaning of headers, templates and removal of those templates not in use.
With regard to curbing the pesky calls, 10-digit numbers have been difficult to tackle. Vodafone Idea recently presented its regulatory sandbox which it had developed with Tanla Platforms to Trai. The system uses an algorithm to block fraudulent or spam calls. Based on this, Trai is also expected to issue a standard process framework in the next two weeks that will detail the regulations around the same for all telcos.
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“Every telco is free to implement their own sandbox based on the principles and guidelines suggested by Trai. This will come after the pilot project is completed,” Trai chairman PD Vaghela had said last month.
According to a survey by community social media platform LocalCircles, nine in 10 subscribers complain of getting pesky or unwanted calls for brand promotion or sales despite registering for the Do Not Disturb (DND) service of their respective operator. The report said the DND service is ineffective in the sense that the unwanted calls come from personal mobile numbers and not landline or commercial numbers of a particular brand, bypassing the DND system.
