Mandatory Identification Code prefix for all Alphanumeric Sender ID & 5-digit short code
Date: Will be effective from the 1st Feb 2009 (as per TRAI).
Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), through its Telecom Unsolicited Commercial Communications Regulations, 2008 dated 21st October 2008, provides for protection and complaint handling against voice communication.
Whereas whenever a subscriber gets an unsolicited commercial communication in the form of Short Message Service
(SMS), the identification of the sender of such SMS is normally in one or other of the following forms, namely:-
(a) Ten digit normal mobile number like 9844440404 or a ten digit fixed line number etc.
(b) Alphanumeric name like 1message or Axis Bank etc.
(c) Numeric code like 56006 or 58888 etc.
Whenever a subscriber makes a complaint of unsolicited commercial communication by SMS with sender identification other than the normal ten digit mobile or fixed number, it is very difficult and time consuming for the Telecom service provider to identify the service provider from whose network such unsolicited commercial communication originated.
Issuing a fresh set of guidelines, dated 10th Dec, 2008, TRAI has given a direction to all telecom service providers of India to prefix an Identification Code before all Alphanumeric Sender ID and 5-digit short code of every Application to Peer (A2P) SMS.
For further detail please download the full details of the Directive from TRAI website via the link as given below:
http://www.trai.gov.in/WriteReadData/trai/upload/Directives/131/direction10dec08.pdf
The Identification Code will be of three characters,
1st character - Service Provider Code
2nd Character - Service Area Code
3rd Character - Hyphen(as a differentiator).
Hence the maximum length of an Alpha-numeric sender ID will be reduced to 8 characters from the existing 11 characters.
Post implementation of this directive any SMS sent through 1message messaging platform will have the requisite prefix to the Sender ID of the message.
Incase Sender ID is of more than 8 characters, the trailing charactersof Sender ID would be truncated to fetch the first 8 characters of the sender id.
For e.g.
If a normal sender ID is <Axis Bank>; which is of 9 characters(including the space character) and 1message routes the messages using Airtel Karnataka,
it will be automatically truncated to 8 characters and the sender ID will become <AX-Axis Ban>; where 'AX' stands for Airtel Karnataka Code followed by a Hyphen.
Further, as part of the same guidelines, all Numeric sender ids that will be used, (apart from the Virtual Mobile Numbers provided by 1message) need to have clear ownership proof and the same needs to be shared with 1message.
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