Telecom operators, financial services exempt from ban on bulk SMS

By siliconindia   |   Monday, 27 September 2010, 18:16 IST
Printer Print Email Email
Bangalore: The Department of Telecom has excluded transactional SMS from the purview of the ban imposed on bulk short messages at the intervention of the Reserve Bank of India and the telecom operators. DoT has also allowed telecom operators to send SMS to their own subscribers on payment details, validity period or service alerts in a condition that telecom operators will be held responsible in case any anti-social message creeps into the network. Transactional SMS includes messages sent by banks, travel services such as airlines, railways and insurance companies to their customers. Various network performance related alerts - outages, day end report related, work orders, ticket booking closures, etc are allowed. However, SMS sent through third party aggregators will not be permitted since most of these players do not have the technology to separately identify transactional messages from other promotional SMS. The DoT had imposed the ban on account of the expected Allahabad High Court verdict on the Ayodhya issue. Operators had earlier written to the DoT seeking a complete revoking of the ban. According to one industry estimate, operators get about 200 crore annually from selling bulk SMS and a one week ban would cost about 10 crore. But more than the revenue impact, the tangential impact on those who use SMS to communicate with their consumers is what is bothering the industry. Telecom operators are also concerned about being held responsible for messages sent by banks and other agencies.