“Hi, it’s been a while since you shopped @myshop and here’s a sweetener for you. Grab this lifetime shopping opportunity.” This is a common theme and format of text messages received in the SMS inbox. Such unsolicited, pesky messages have turned the phone’s SMS inbox into a spam inbox.
The menace of unsolicited text messages is not new but an ongoing issue since mobile phones became common in India. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has been attempting to curb it for over a decade now.
TRAI’s Unsuccessful Efforts
In 2010, TRAI’s sixth amendment introduced an SMS header format for business entities sending promotional texts. A promotional SMS can only be delivered between the hours of 9 AM and 9 PM and is used to communicate offers, discounts, or promotions to new or existing customers.
A transactional SMS is used to send one time passwords, informational messages, booking information or order alerts to registered customers and should not be intended for marketing.
This is how the telecom authority created different categories through which promotional messages could be differentiated from personal messages.
Besides, TRAI introduced ‘National Do Not Disturb’ (NDND) service, a portal where users can either restrict all communication or just communication from a predetermined list of preference categories such as banking, real estate, education, health and others.
Current Interactions between Principal Entity, Telemarketers and Telecom Operators
According to a report named Telechain: Bridging Telecom Policy and Blockchain Practice, since its launch in 2010, the NDND register has collected preference data from more than 230 million customers who have chosen to opt out of receiving promotional messages.
The report added that since the implementation of the service, more than 2 million complaints have been filed, 460000 numbers have been blocklisted and 1.4 million phone numbers have been disconnected for violations.
Despite all the efforts, the pesky messages couldn’t stop. In 2018, the government body released a draft discussing the implementation of blockchain technology to bring an end to the trouble faced by customers.
When blockchain submitted to telemarketers
In the same year, TRAI roped in Tech Mahindra which—in collaboration with Microsoft—built the blockchain solution to enable telecom companies to prevent unauthorised access of their customers’ phone numbers.
“Blockchain as a technology is a powerful tool to combat the issue of spam calls and fraud risks, to protect user information, as well as the integrity of the telecom sector. This Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)-based solution will enable enterprises to stop financial frauds and perpetration of misleading financial information by unregistered telecom marketers who rampantly use the SMS service of Telcos,” said Rajesh Dhuddu, Global Practice Leader, Blockchain, Tech Mahindra, during the announcement of the collaboration with Microsoft for building Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)-based solution to curb spam messages and calls.
After three years, the trial was launched in March 2021 and failed miserably. The attempted solution started to block even legitimate messages like one-time password (OTP) leading to the authority withdrawing the project hastily.
TRAI blamed the telco companies and SMS issuers, claiming that they didn’t do their paperwork properly.
“It’s true that telecom companies didn’t do the job properly which caused the failure of the service,” said Raj Kapoor, Founder, India Blockchain Association—an industry body that represents businesses and professionals participating in the blockchain-based digital economy.
He added that because telecom companies earn millions of dollars in revenue from this activity, they don’t want to implement these rules. A ban on promotional messages means direct monetary loss to them.
Only blockchain can solve the problem
According to the research proposed by Microsoft, a consortium blockchain network should be created between the participating entities—telemarketers contributing physical nodes in the blockchain, telecom operators, third party service providers and a regulatory authority.
Proposed interaction among different stakeholders in the telecommunication system
Any modification of a customer’s preferences in the NDND register made using a mobile application, a web portal, or the customer support services of a telecom operator is encoded as a transaction in the system. Each member of the network keeps a copy of the blockchain state, including the DND register, which is updated on the servers of the participating entities. This makes it possible for subscribers to update their preferences almost instantly—cutting down the time required from nearly seven days to a few minutes.
According to experts, since the blockchain automates the coordination between multiple stakeholders and their matching cryptographic identities on the system, its use is suitable for the presented situation. The requirement for scrubbing ensures that telemarketers never have access to a list of phone numbers that has been screened to prevent bad actors from working together with unregistered telemarketers. In order to carry out the promotional campaign, the partner telecom operator must share data with other telecom operators. However, this requirement is substantially simplified by the separation of the files through the scrubbing operations into respective files for telecom operators. The subscribers’ privacy is safeguarded throughout the process via the hashing and sharing of phone numbers and other sensitive information.
Your reaction
Discussion
What's your take on this story?
No comments yet — be the first to share your view.