TRAI Cracks Down on Pesky Calls: Service Providers Ordered to Take Action

New Delhi, Aug 6 (PTI) Amid consumer complaints about pesky calls, TRAI on Tuesday held a meeting and conveyed a strong message to service providers and their telemarketers to take effective measures to curb bulk communications using voice calls.

As part of the crackdown, the regulator has sought proactive action from all the stakeholders specially access service providers (telcos) and their delivery telemarketers. The immediate action sought includes implementing technical solutions for traceability and preventing bulk calling by enterprise customers using 10-digit numbers.

"The regulator has conveyed a strong message to the service providers and their telemarketers to come forward and take effective measures to curb bulk communications using voice calls," the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) said in a release.

In view of the consumer complaints about unsolicited commercial calls, TRAI held a meeting on Tuesday with access service providers and their delivery telemarketers to deliberate the action on spammers.

The meeting deliberated on instances of misuse of headers and content templates without the knowledge of the entities concerned. Steps taken by access service providers and delivery telemarketers to identify and trace the entities responsible for sending such messages and need for corrective measures to prevent such cases, were also discussed.

Other aspects discussed in the meeting were control of promo calls whether robotic calls, auto-dialler calls, or pre-recorded calls, and migration of all such enterprise business customers on the Distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform for sending bulk communication in compliance with TRAI regulations.