New Delhi: Telecom operators<\/a> have pushed back until further notice the January 31 deadline for business entities to register their SMS content templates, citing inability of nearly half of businesses to comply with the regulation in the given timeframe.
As per telecom industry<\/a> executives, close to 50% of companies including banks, financial institutions and government agencies had not adopted the new blockchain-based system which checks the flow of spam SMS traffic<\/a>.
“After multiple deliberations with the industry and the telecom regulator, it has been decided to push the deadline until further notice as certain mission critical services such as financial institutions and UIDAI<\/a>, which provide Aadhaar authentication for direct benefit transfer, have not yet integrated their APIs<\/a> (interfaces) with the new system,” a senior executive at a telecom company told ET.
Blocking unregistered SMS traffic from February 1 would have caused massive disruption in critical services, such as sending of OTPs and other transactional SMSes, which forced telcos to delay the second phase of implementation.
According to the Telecom Communications Customer Preference Regulations, all business entities who send promotional\/transactional\/service mobile messages must register their unique header name, SMS content template and user consent to receive such messages.
Telcos, who own and operate the blockchain, can decide the implementation dates for the regulations among themselves, but need to keep the sector regulator informed on each phase of implementation.
As part of the first phase that kicked off on September 1, 2020, operators started blocking traffic with unregistered and dubious headers, (such as AX-PHONEPE), which has already caused a 90% decline in SMS frauds, ET had reported.
<\/p>Read also<\/h4>