The new no-spam policy from TRAI under the National Consumer Preference Register (NCPR) is being implemented from tomorrow and there is already a sort of chaos amongst the businesses relying heavily on SMS as a medium to communicate. There is no solution in the market as to how all the e-commerce and other web businesses communicate with their audience. All we can hope is that like all other rules from TRAI even this will be delayed.
Meanwhile, FaceBook in a bid to retain its user base who receive FaceBook updates over SMS has actually messaged its users to de-register from DND(Do Not Disturb) registry.
Your number is registered with Do Not Call Registry. To receive Facebook SMS after Feb 1 you must de-register by texting STOP DND to 1909.
A lot of other VAS content providers are also compelled to do similar things. If the industry itself is encouraging customers against a government policy than surely there is something wrong and government needs to re-look into it before there is enough chaos to put people out of business.
Industry insiders believe that rule was lobbied by some large operators who shut the Bulk SMS business publicly (but continue to still promote it). The reason behind this as said is that there is no interconnectivity charges(or termination charge) paid to destination operator incase of SMS but the spectrum utilization is same for sender and receiver. Since most users are on this large network but bulk SMS is being mostly bought from TATA this made complete sense.
Whatever the case is, there needs to be a solution for this. How are you solving the issue for your business? Shutting shop after 9PM?
Update: Facebook could have have asked its customers to register for only category 6 of NCPR which covers -Communication/ Broadcasting/ Entertainment/ IT by sending an SMS “Start 6″ to 1909 but unluckily that rule will be implemented only from tomorrow and by then it will be too late.
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