100 SMSes limit to steal freedom from youngsters

Sep 27, 2011 |

New Delhi

Tags:

SMS
TRAI

Youngsters are likely rue curbs on their unfettered freedom to communicate as the telecom regulator begining on Tuesday would restrict the number of text messages from a SIM to 100 a day.

College students are the biggest users of the short messaging service (SMS) — which are available at affordable tariffs — to chat with their friends and would be the hard hit by the new norms.

COAI, which represents GSM operators, is in discussion with the Trai to remove the cap on SMSes.
The new Trai regulations would also disallow popular internet websites such as Way2SMS and 160by2 from sending SMSes to a mobile user, who barred the unsolicited SMSes.

People, mostly youngsters, use the internet-based text messaging companies to send free SMSes to their friends.

“Unfortunately the new regulation treat websites like ours as telemarketers, which is not correct. We offer person-to-person communications. People use it to send personal messages and not telemarketing communications,” said Mr V.V. Raju, the CEO of Way2SMS.

He said that the firm will inform its subscribers about the people, who are on the fully blocked category, to whom the SMSes could not be sent.

The Hyderabad-based company claims to have 20 million users and its platform is managing 365 million mobile contacts.

With the new norms barring pesky messages between 9 pm and 9 am, the people will not able to use these websites during this period to send messages even to their those, who are not in the fully blocked category.

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