India escapes SMS outage as Trai rule on hold till September 30

After telcos, banks and others highlighted that message delivery may get disrupted on September 1 due to the whitelisting mandate for certain messages, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has extended the deadline by one month.

In a directive issued a few weeks ago, the regulator had asked telcos to stop transmitting messages containing URLs, OTT links, APKs (Android application packages) or call-back numbers that are not whitelisted--or registered with telcos--by senders from September 1.

But the industry urged the regulator to give some more time for implementing the mandate as they need to update their system, failing which there could be large-scale disruption in delivering service and transactional messages.


“Top executives from the stakeholders like banks and telecom firms urged for the extension. They said they will ensure compliance after the extension, so some more time is being given to them,” an official said. Trai has now extended the deadline to October 1.

ET reported in its August 24 edition about the impending disruption in delivery of service and transactional messages from banks, financial institutions and ecommerce firms on their mobile phones from next month following the Trai mandate, which was aimed at curbing spam, specifically phishing attempts.

The regulator, however, wants the industry to abide by the mandate after the extension as it is required to curb phishing, which has become a major issue these days.

“Now there will be enough time for the industry to do the whitelisting and they should do it proactively, so that there is no customer inconvenience when it is implemented,” said another official.

Whitelisting means entities sending commercial messages must provide all information related to URLs, call-back numbers, etc., to telcos, who will then feed the information to their blockchain-based distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform. If the information matches, the message is passed; otherwise, it is blocked.

Currently, entities get their headers and templates registered with telcos but not the content like URLs, OTT links etc of messages. This means that operators don’t undertake scrubbing or checking these details during transmission of a message. But once the whitelisting mandate kicks-in, telcos have to create a mechanism that can read the specific content of commercial messages like the URLs, OTT links and call back numbers etc, and block those that do not match its records, experts say.

Trai has been nudging telcos to implement the whitelisting mechanism since May last year, but the industry has not yet prepared the infrastructure. In May last year, Trai had asked the telcos to ensure that only whitelisted URLs/APKs/OTT links and call back numbers were present in the content template and a compliance report regarding the same should be submitted to it within 45 days. In the directions, the regulator had asked telcos to always ensure traceability of messages from senders to recipients.

But some of the directions issued last year, “have not been implemented, in entirety, till date,” Trai said.

It added that it has observed many instances of misuse of headers and templates, but telcos have not taken effective steps to prevent such misuse and trace the origin of the traffic when such incidents are reported.