Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has recently issued a new order that will end the 100 SMSs a day offer available on most prepaid plans by telecom operators such as Jio, Airtel, Vodafone-Idea, BSNL, and even MTNL. TRAI has amended the Telecommunication Tariff, as part of the 65th Amendment Order, 2020 to remove the SMS limit per day. Read on to know what it means for prepaid users in the country.
TRAI removes 100 SMS/day limit
As per the new order by TRAI, users will now be able to send more than 100 SMSs a day to any number as part of their prepaid plans. This means that Airtel, Jio, Vodafone-Idea, BSNL, and MTNL will soon have to add changes to their respective prepaid plans to remove the per day limit set for text messaging.
In addition to this, TRAI won't charge users 50 paise per message when the SMS limit ends. To recall, earlier once a user reached his or her SMS limit for a day, he or she would be charged 50p/SMS. For those who don't know, the SMS charge was introduced way back in 2012 (as Schedule XIII of the Telecommunication Tariff Order, 1999) to curb the spread of spam messages. This came under the then Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulation, 2010 (TCCCPR 2010).
However, the TCCCPR 2010 was replaced by TCCCPR 2018 to provide tech-focused methods to limit the reach of Unsolicited Commercial Communication (UCC) with various features such as Do Not Disturb (DND) or blocking, the charge has now been removed.
Furthermore, TRAI has asked stakeholders to provide their comments and views on this via a video call to be arranged on June 17, 2020.
As a reminder, TRAI recently put all rumours to rest and suggested that it won't adopt the 11-digit mobile number scheme and will stick to a 10-digit phone number for users after rejecting the recommendations. Additionally, TRAI will require users to prefix 0 before making calls from landline number to a mobile number.
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