TRAI issues TCCP Regulations, 2014

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) yesterday issued the "The Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference (Sixteenth Amendment) Regulations, 2014", allowing interactive SMS transactional communication, with sufficient safeguards, to facilitate various user friendly applications.

The TRAI has taken a series of measures in the recent past for curbing the menace of Unsolicited Commercial Communications (UCC). It issued "The Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations, 2010 (TCCCPRegulations, 2010)" on 1st December 2010, which came into force from 27th September 2011. Subsequently, for addressing the operational issues and for tightening the regulatory framework, a number of amendments have been issued to the principal regulations besides issue of a number of directions. These regulations mandate only alpha headers for sending transactional messages, with no reply path for responding to such messages.

TRAI has received a number of representations from various stakeholders requesting the Authority for allowing a two way communication facility for transactional messages as many applications developed by them requires two-way or interactive communication through SMS between users or between users and application. Due to limitation of the existing systems, two way communications through alpha headers is not feasible and there is a need for numeric headers to support such two-way messaging.

The Authority, after considering these requests also felt the need for a two-way interactive SMS transactional communication because of various user friendly applications. Various ILD service providers have also requested the Authority to allow carrying international transactional messages from international entities.

Accordingly, TRAI has issued "The Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference (Sixteenth Amendment) Regulations, 2014", allowing two-way transactional message using short codes allotted by service providers, starting with 5 as an header. To ensure suitable safeguards, the penalties for such transactional messages with two way communications are double than that for normal transactional messages. Also in case of transactional messages by international entities carried by various entities, provisions have been made for additional penalties on these entities for violations.

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