Trai extends deadline on comments for International Traffic paper

Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has extended the deadline for industry stakeholders to send in their comments and counter comments on the consultation paper titled “Definition of International Traffic”, it said in a notification Tuesday.

Stakeholders now have till June 20 to submit their comments on the issues raised in the discussion paper and July 4 to submit their counter comments.

Earlier, the deadline for comment and counter comment submission was May 30 and June 13, respectively.

Trai released the consultation paper on May 2 after a request by two entities to instruct telecom service providers (TSPs) to allow transmission of transactional SMS (short message service) traffic under the domestic route.

Transactional messages are sent out by enterprises to their customers to deliver important information regarding the personal use of the business’s services or products. Examples include authentication or OTP messages, shipping confirmation, account balance alerts and password reset messages.

In response to the letters of the two entities, the regulator had written to the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) to investigate whether the messages in question are domestic or international in nature.

The DoT wrote to Trai in August 2022 that under the current unified license agreement, there is no explicit definition of domestic or international SMS.

However, the UL does define inter circle and intra circle telecommunication traffic (and SMS is a subset of telecommunication traffic), thus indirectly defining domestic traffic.

There is no explicit definition of international traffic though.

In the discussion paper, Trai has suggested international traffic be defined as “international long-distance traffic originating in one country and terminating in another country, where one of the countries is India” and has asked stakeholders to comment on the same.