India: SMS sending to be restricted to 100 per day

Are you fond of sending text messages via SMS? Well, sad to say that our friends from India won’t really have a choice, because the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) plans to regulate sending of SMS for everyone.

According to Indian tech blog Tech2, starting Feb 1st 2011, all telecom operators will be forced to restrict over 700 million mobile phone subscribers to only 100 SMS sent per day. Being an industry-wide regulation, consumers won’t be able to avail of more SMS, even if they are willing to pay.

The reason cited by TRAI is that “unsolicited commercial communications can be/are being sent by unregistered telemarketers and such messages can be sent by any person and they are essentially in the category of P2P communications.”

According to a study, Indians in urban cities send only an average of only 29 SMS per day. 75% of them, however, receives AT LEAST 4 marketing/promotional texts in a day. With statistics like these, it doesn’t come as a shock that the TRAI is taking action against it.

This is not TRAI’s only action to curb spam SMS. Transactional and promotional SMS will be filtered using different IDs that will go through the national Do Not Call register.

I’m not exactly sure how Indian netizens will react to this but I am guessing with the availability of alternative channels to talk, it wouldn’t be a huge issue for some.