Telecom Companies Need to Provide Tariff Plan for Only Calls And SMS, New Rule Mandates, Bharti Airtel

For the last few years, data has been included in most of the tariff plans of telecom companies. Due to this, customers who do not use data have to pay a little more. Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has made it mandatory for telecom companies to provide separate tariff plans for voice calls and SMS by changing the rules.

“The service provider shall offer a minimum of one special tariff voucher for voice calls and SMS, the period of validity of which shall not exceed 365 days,” TRAI said in the amended Telecom Consumers Protection Regulations. This will benefit those users who do not use data. Along with this, TRAI has also allowed telecom companies to provide recharge vouchers of any value. However, these companies will have to issue a recharge coupon of at least Rs 10.

The telecom regulator has also taken some measures to deal with the problem of spam calls and messages. TRAI has imposed fine on big telecom companies for failing to curb this problem. Even before this, fines have been imposed on these companies under the Telecom Commercial Communication Customer Preference Regulations (TCCCPR).

TCCCPR was implemented in 2010. Its purpose is to protect subscribers from spam calls and messages. TRAI’s new rule called message traceability has been implemented from December 11. This rule will help in reducing spam messages. This rule was to be implemented from December 1 but it was postponed on the request of telecom companies. However, the actual deadline for this was October 31. With the new system, the sender of the message can be tracked till its delivery. Recently, Bharti Airtel, one of the big telecom companies, had said that it has been warned of more than 8 billion spam calls on its network. About two and a half months ago, the company had launched a solution based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to deal with the problem of spam calls and messages. After this, the company’s subscribers receive warnings when they receive spam calls and messages. Bharti Airtel had said that with the help of this solution, about 10 lakh spammers are identified every day on its network.