Separate number series for marketing, service calls soon to curb spam
telecom regulator shall soon issue a mandate to demarcate separate numbering series for transactional versus marketing calls made by businesses for commercial purposes.
Currently, only 140 number series are allocated for all kinds of commercial purposes. These could in future be classified into (140) marketing and (160 or 161) for service calls to easily identify the purpose of the caller. The move is complementary to Trai's (telecom regulatory authority of India) recent recommendations for network operators as well as mobile device makers to enable display of caller's name, both for personal phone numbers as well as enterprise callers.
«The DoT has approved our recommendation to allocate separate series which have been tested for both purposes...Trai shall soon issue a direction in this regard,» a senior Trai official told ET.
He added that voice calls have lately become a larger spam channel as compared to SMSes after the implementation of the blockchain-based filtering system by telcos. «While SMS complaints have come down to just 30,000 per month, reports against unwanted calls through 10-digit personal numbers have gone upto a few lakhs.»
This is largely because, even though the 140-numbering series is reserved for commercial purposes, subscribers have stopped receiving them assuming that a number originating from 140 would be spam. Enterprises, therefore, started using personal numbers.
«Even banks were unable to fulfil transaction verification calls because subscribers would simply ignore 140 numbers.
