Emergic: Rajesh Jain's Blog

Banning bulk SMS seems to have become the natural reaction to any law-and-order issue. The government did it around the time of the Ayodhya verdict and did it again last week. Leave aside the fact that the fear spread was because of P2P SMS, rather than A2P SMS. The government had to be seen doing [...]

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5.       Mobile number churn needs to be explicitly known and handled since it is a big source of complaints. This applies in the case of the opt-ins and transactional messages. Companies do not know when numbers churn. Therefore, what is needed is a Churned Numbers Database. When a number appears in this database, it will need [...]

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Last week, TRAI announced new rules for telemarketing in India in an effort to combat spam. I have written on this topic many times before, since NetCore is a key player in both the transactional and promotional SMS business (as part of our Digital, Real-Time Communications vertical). On the whole, the rules are a good [...]

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There are two possible approaches that can be taken with the green and red channels approach. In the first approach, one could start by treating every entity that sends A2P SMSes on the green channel. Green channel messages are not stopped or delayed. Then, as complaints come in, the rate at which messages are delivered [...]

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I had written a detailed series on the A2P SMS business in India a year ago. This is what I had written then: Creating a Do Call is certainly detrimental. The whole failure of implementation of Do Not Call (DNC) is being covered up by such a drastic measure. We assume that people who have [...]

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TRAI needs to intervene immediately in the matter of SMS Interconnect charges and do the following: Change the “forbearance” policy to “Bill-and-Keep” until further direction. This will ensure that arbitrary charges between operators do not start creating havoc for SMS aggregators, enterprises and consumer SMS companies. Start a consultation process to determine SMS costs and [...]

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I wrote an 11-part series on the issue of A2P SMS interconnect in September.  In the past week, the issues of SMS pricing and SMS interconnect charges have been at the centre of two big stories in Times of India (business lead) and Business Standard (front page): Times of India (Nov 5):  “…the cost to [...]

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A related issue that also needs is the issue of SMS Spam that has grown rapidly in the past few months. TRAI already has a mechanism in place – the Do Not Call Registry. About 10% of Indian mobile numbers are on this list. Telemarketers are not supposed to call or SMS those on this [...]

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In the ideal world, there need be no SMS interconnect charges, leaving each operator to make a decision whether it wanted to enter the A2P business or not. But, if there has to be a charge, it needs to be based on costs, and not a randomly high figure like Airtel has chosen to apply. [...]

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What does this mean for end customers? If other large operators followed Airtel with SMS interconnects, businesses would end up paying substantially higher prices for A2P SMS capacity. Given that SMS is becoming a necessity across many lines of business in various industries, this is an unfair penalty being imposed on enterprises and therefore on [...]

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Cut to 2008. Tata Teleservices Limited (TTSL) got aggressively into the A2P SMS business. They invested in SMS capacity and offered aggregators significant SMS capacity and aggressive pricing. This helped grow usage dramatically. Airtel lost market share in the A2P SMS business. With Airtel having more than a quarter of the mobile subscribers, it still [...]

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To understand the dynamics of the A2P space, we will now need to stop being general and actually take names. The idea is not to offend or malign anyone, but lay out the facts so there can be a sensible debate about the issues involved. All of this is fairly common knowledge to everyone associated [...]

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Description: Some operators have started initiating action to do bilateral agreements on SMS interconnect (P2P and A2P) The current situation is that of bill-and-keep – the operator through which the SMS is initiated does the billing and retains the revenue thus generated The current regime of no inter-connect charges payable between operators on SMS should [...]

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In short, while a P2P SMS could cost 2p or so, an A2P SMS costs much lower (probably under 1 paisa) for the mobile operator. As an aside, P2P SMS pricing varies dramatically – we could pay as little as 5p as part of an SMS pack or as high as Re 1 or more. [...]

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As many of us have noticed, SMS is not carried on the same channel as Voice. What this means is that we can send and receive SMS even as we are speaking. SMS is actually carried on the SS7 signalling channel which is otherwise used for call set-up. As we all know, a single SMS [...]

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Continuing with the four types of A2P SMS: Business – Promotional: These are messages sent by businesses to their customers (current or prospective). In the case of prospective customers, messages are sent to those who are not on the Do Not Call Registry. They are not linked with any transaction, and are typically used to [...]

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Let us dig a little more into A2P SMS. There are four types of A2P SMS: Consumer – Opt-in: These are messages we receive for free when we subscribe (opt-in) to an SMS channel. MyToday offers 40+ editorially controlled SMS channels, while MyToday Mobs, SMS Gupshup and Google SMS channels have thousands of groups in [...]

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In this series, I will discuss the opportunities around A2P SMS. I have written earlier about the power and potential of push-based customer communications and Invertising. India has seen good innovation and growth in the use of SMS. However, recent actions by some operators are working to constrain the growth and negatively impact this industry. [...]

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Here is the text of the speech. The presentation to go with it is here. What’s been the biggest revolution in retail in India? It has NOT been hundreds of malls across India. The real revolution is what is in the hands of everyone – the interactive device. Every customer of every enterprise now has [...]

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