“Hello, it’s been some time because you shopped @myshop and right here’s a sweetener for you. Seize this lifetime purchasing alternative.” It is a widespread theme and format of textual content messages obtained within the SMS inbox. Such unsolicited, pesky messages have turned the cellphone’s SMS inbox right into a spam inbox.
The menace of unsolicited textual content messages is just not new however an ongoing situation since cell phones turned widespread in India. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has been making an attempt to curb it for over a decade now.
TRAI’s Unsuccessful Efforts
In 2010, TRAI’s sixth modification launched an SMS header format for enterprise entities sending promotional texts. A promotional SMS can solely be delivered between the hours of 9 AM and 9 PM and is used to speak presents, reductions, or promotions to new or current prospects.
A transactional SMS is used to ship one time passwords, informational messages, reserving info or order alerts to registered prospects and shouldn’t be meant for advertising.
That is how the telecom authority created totally different classes by which promotional messages might be differentiated from private messages.
In addition to, TRAI launched ‘Nationwide Do Not Disturb’ (NDND) service, a portal the place customers can both limit all communication or simply communication from a predetermined record of desire classes similar to banking, actual property, schooling, well being and others.
Present Interactions between Principal Entity, Telemarketers and Telecom Operators
In accordance with a report named Telechain: Bridging Telecom Policy and Blockchain Practice, since its launch in 2010, the NDND register has collected desire information from greater than 230 million prospects who’ve chosen to choose out of receiving promotional messages.
The report added that because the implementation of the service, greater than 2 million complaints have been filed, 460000 numbers have been blocklisted and 1.4 million cellphone numbers have been disconnected for violations.
Regardless of all of the efforts, the pesky messages couldn’t cease. In 2018, the federal government physique launched a draft discussing the implementation of blockchain expertise to deliver an finish to the difficulty confronted by prospects.
When blockchain submitted to telemarketers
In the identical 12 months, TRAI roped in Tech Mahindra which—in collaboration with Microsoft—constructed the blockchain answer to allow telecom firms to forestall unauthorised entry of their prospects’ cellphone numbers.
“Blockchain as a expertise is a robust instrument to fight the difficulty of spam calls and fraud dangers, to guard consumer info, in addition to the integrity of the telecom sector. This Distributed Ledger Expertise (DLT)-based answer will allow enterprises to cease monetary frauds and perpetration of deceptive monetary info by unregistered telecom entrepreneurs who rampantly use the SMS service of Telcos,” mentioned Rajesh Dhuddu, World Observe Chief, Blockchain, Tech Mahindra, throughout the announcement of the collaboration with Microsoft for constructing Distributed Ledger Expertise (DLT)-based answer to curb spam messages and calls.
After three years, the trial was launched in March 2021 and failed miserably. The tried answer began to dam even authentic messages like one-time password (OTP) resulting in the authority withdrawing the mission swiftly.
TRAI blamed the telco firms and SMS issuers, claiming that they didn’t do their paperwork correctly.
“It’s true that telecom firms didn’t do the job correctly which prompted the failure of the service,” mentioned Raj Kapoor, Founder, India Blockchain Affiliation—an trade physique that represents companies and professionals taking part within the blockchain-based digital economic system.
He added that as a result of telecom firms earn hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in income from this exercise, they don’t need to implement these guidelines. A ban on promotional messages means direct financial loss to them.
Solely blockchain can clear up the issue
In accordance with the analysis proposed by Microsoft, a consortium blockchain community needs to be created between the taking part entities—telemarketers contributing bodily nodes within the blockchain, telecom operators, third get together service suppliers and a regulatory authority.
Proposed interaction amongst totally different stakeholders within the telecommunication system
Any modification of a buyer’s preferences within the NDND register made utilizing a cell utility, an internet portal, or the client assist companies of a telecom operator is encoded as a transaction within the system. Every member of the community retains a duplicate of the blockchain state, together with the DND register, which is up to date on the servers of the taking part entities. This makes it potential for subscribers to replace their preferences nearly immediately—chopping down the time required from almost seven days to some minutes.
In accordance with consultants, because the blockchain automates the coordination between a number of stakeholders and their matching cryptographic identities on the system, its use is appropriate for the offered scenario. The requirement for scrubbing ensures that telemarketers by no means have entry to a listing of cellphone numbers that has been screened to forestall dangerous actors from working along with unregistered telemarketers. So as to perform the promotional marketing campaign, the companion telecom operator should share information with different telecom operators. Nonetheless, this requirement is considerably simplified by the separation of the information by the scrubbing operations into respective information for telecom operators. The subscribers’ privateness is safeguarded all through the method through the hashing and sharing of cellphone numbers and different delicate info.
