TRAI plans to impose 5 paise on commercial text messages

In a move to strengthen measures to prevent pesky messages and calls, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) plans to impose a termination charge of five paisa for every commercial SMS on service providers from where the messages originate. This means the operators will have to pay a minimum interconnect usage charge of five paisa per commercial SMS to the other.

The new TRAI regulations will be in effect from 28 September, 2011. “We are likely to issue a regulation by October 15 to impose the five-paise termination charge on commercial SMSs, and not on general SMSs,” Trai chairman J S Sarma said. 

Currently, some of service providers charge 10-15 paisa per SMS as termination fee on mutual agreements, but it is not mandatory. 

The new TRAI regulations have restricted the number of messages to 100 a day for a pre-paid user and 3,000 a month for the post-paid user, to prevent misuse by non-registered telemarketers. The restrictions will not be applicable on special/festival days. 

The telemarketing firms or service providers flouting the norms will be charged a penalty of up to Rs 2.5 lakh. However, the dealers of telecom operators, DTH players e-ticketing agencies and social networking and micro-blogging sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Orkut, LinkedIn and GooglePlus and agencies providing directory services such as Justdial and Askme and transactional messages from banks/insurance companies, airlines/railways etc. have been exempted.

Source: http://cablequest.org/news/telecom-news/item/1051-trai-plans-to-impose-5-paise-on-commercial-text-messages.htmlSource: http://cablequest.org/news/telecom-news/item/1051-trai-plans-to-impose-5-paise-on-commercial-text-messages.html