The Telcos instructed to turn off SMS filters in the coming 7 days.

The implementation of the unsolicited commercial communication (UCC) framework was suspended on Tuesday by The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) which disrupted various Unified Payments Interface (UPI), Aadhaar-enabled Payments (AePS), netbanking and credit card payments, among others, due on Monday.

Indian telecom regulator Trai has suspended the implementation of measures to curb pesky messages for a week. Earlier, SMSes and phone calls were blocked to prevent such services and transactions such as net banking, ecommerce sales and Aadhaar authentication from being disrupted.

“It has been observed that some of the principal entities have not fulfilled the requirements as envisaged in Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations, 2018 (TCCCPR, 2018),” Trai said in a statement. In order to make sure that no inconvenience was caused to customers, the regulator has suspended the implementation of the regulation for seven days.

The Economist had reported on March 9, 2018 about a disruption caused to several online services due to telemarketers' inability to register their senders' IDs and context of text messages on telco's blockchain platform.

In the era of globalization, smaller players are struggling to catch up.

Due to this, many bulk text messages didn't send through.

A source with knowledge of the matter indicates that the drop rate in commercial SMS has dropped to 33% this second day from 40% the preceding day.

On Tuesday, the failure rate was 10% against 25% on Monday in banking and financial services. Almost 1 billion commercial SMSes are sent daily in India on average.

The Telecom executives claim Trai has instructed them to switch off the filtration process today (Tuesday).

Several leading telemarketers have said the relaxation will give companies with lapsed reminders time to get on track.

Telcos now have to verify every SMS they send with a registered text before sending them, as part of the Trai's unsolicited commercial communication regulations, which were released in 2018 but are now fully implemented since Monday. Every commercial SMS originating from a registered source is checked for the sender's id, or header, by the blockchain-based solution deployed by telecom operators.

This program only blocks SMS's coming from unauthorized senders. Even the simplest sign-offs like adding or removing full stops are blocked.

An ET senior Trai official denied that any substantial disruption had occurred, and called out companies for having not registered their SMS content by the March 15, 2020 deadline, despite ad campaigns in newspapers and repeated reminders received from telcos.

“We will have to switch off the process of filtration as directed. In any case, the principal entities must now register within one week, after which there should be no difficulty again,” said a senior executive at one of the three private telcos.

In addition, another telecom executive added that to be registered it only takes a week, and nobody can blame the operators for OTP misses.