In a recent development, a range of services and transactions such as netbanking, credit card payments, railway ticket bookings, e-commerce services, Aadhaar authentication, etc, were disrupted on March 08, 2021, as SMSes and OTPs did not go through after telcos implemented the new set of regulations for commercial text messages.
As per industry sources, around 40 per cent of the traffic was disrupted. Among top private and public sector banks, the failure rate was over 25 per cent.
While payments companies, banks and other service providers have regarded the faulty implementation of the new regulations by the telcos for this, the telcos have in turn blamed the delayed adoption by companies and government bodies for this issue. As per telcos, these service providers failed to register sender IDs and content on the blockchain platforms of telcos, which in turn triggered the high failure rate.
Commenting on the development, Lt. Gen. Dr. SP Kochhar, DG COAI, “TSPs are following TRAI Regulations & have activated due process of content scrubbing to address the issue of unsolicited commercial communication. TSPs has sent various communications to the principle entities to register their Content Template with the TSPs before March 7, 2021. We request all the PEs to get their content template registered with TSPs at the earliest, and help TSPs to address the issue of unsolicited commercial communication.”
