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Technology and policy in India
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has defined international traffic as— traffic that originates in one country and terminates in another with one of these countries being India. This definition comes after the regulator conducted a consultation on international traffic in May last year because two separate entities had urged it to instruct telcos to carry their SMS traffic under the domestic route.
The regulator also defined international SMS traffic as international traffic delivered through SMS. Further, the regulator says that any message from an application to a person (A2P) will be considered ‘international traffic’ if the message “cannot be generated, transmitted or received without the use or intervention of any electronic device, computer system, or computer application located outside India.”
The definition of international SMS bears relevance because TRAI regulates termination charges on domestic SMS. However, telecom companies are free to decide the charges for international SMS. Some have suggested that the main reason behind the entities’ request for clarification on international traffic is the transactional messages (OTPs, e-receipts, delivery updates to name a few) sent by multi-national companies to their customers.
Although companies generate these messages on international servers, they send them to Indian users via Indian servers. This new definition of international traffic suggests that such messages would fall within the scope of international traffic, which means that telecom companies will be free to decide how much they want to charge for sending them.
In its recommendations, TRAI notes that telecom companies already define international SMS under their code of practice (CoP) as—
“a short message service enabling text message to be transferred and/ or originated by any data, application, system, servers, handset device or terminal device etc. which influences, generates, control, facilitate or enable the generation, dissemination, transmission or transition of messages through a communication network process, including partial process, from a location outside the territory of India or a text message originated by handset device or terminal device located in India to such application, system, servers etc. located outside India prompted in response to a short message by such data, application, system, servers etc. Any mediation server solution in India shall not impact and/ or change the nature of such International SMS to national/ domestic SMS”
This definition suggests that simply because Indian servers are acting as mediators in carrying the message for a company, that doesn’t automatically make the messages domestic. Notably, TRAI’s definition bears similarity to this one, given that the regulator also suggests that if a company cannot generate a message without the involvement of a device outside of India, then it would fall within the scope of international SMS.
TRAI notes that as per the unified license the two segments of domestic traffic have the following definitions—
“The Authority is of the opinion that defining ‘international traffic’ in terms of the place of origination and termination of traffic would be consistent with the scheme of Unified License,” it argues explaining the rationale behind the definition of international traffic.
Further discussing international SMS, the authority notes that there are two kinds of international messages:
While in the P2P case both originating and terminating devices are customer handsets, in A2P, the message originates in a computer system and terminates at a customer device. TRAI notes that stakeholder comments had mentioned that companies route A2P traffic to India through mediation servers, while the core application/server through which they generate messages is located outside India. TRAI said in this way companies can end up camouflaging international SMS as domestic to avoid legitimate international SMS termination charges. “To prevent such a camouflage, it would be appropriate to treat any incoming A2P SMS message as international SMS message if it cannot be generated, transmitted or received without the use or intervention of a computer system or application located outside India,” TRAI recommended.
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