Tech Inadequacy Is Just An Excuse

Now that the operators are tired of giving excuses to meet the government's directive, they seem to have taken the shelter of not having adequate technology in place.

In a recent development, the government of India ordered operators to stop the bulk SMS (maximum limit of 5 SMS/user) facility for 15 days to control rumors that resulted into an exodus of the people belonging to the North-Eastern states of India. While the operators agreed to implement the directive for prepaid subscribers, the Cellular Operators Association of India told the Department of Telecommunications that they are unable to implement the mandate for postpaid users due to technical challenges like tracking postpaid users in real time.

For some operators, it just seems to be an excuse to protect the interest of their premium subscribers, while for others, this may call for an investment which operators might be avoiding fearing revenue pressures.

"It's not impossible but is certainly challenging and requires time, effort and money. They [operators] are partly right. However, if they can implement the limit to 200 SMS-a-day, 5 SMS-a-day is also feasible," says a top technology expert.

In this context, it is important to note that postpaid subscribers form only about 5 percent of the total subscriber base in the country.

"All that they have to do is to change the counter from 200 to 5 and they can do it. There is a filter associated with the message that goes to a third-party server and you can put a restriction on it. But it is certainly a difficult solution to implement. Secondly, for the time being, operators can treat all of their customers as prepaid for internal purpose and then can implement the restriction," the expert adds.

COAI Director-General, Rajan S Mathews, however, told Light Reading India that since the threat is largely from the prepaid section of subscribers and that postpaid subscribers are verified customers, largely from enterprises, it may not be much of a help to intervene in the systems.

Amongst all the reasoning, let's assume a scenario where the country faces an external threat which calls for an immediate complete ban on the SMSes, within the circles or country. Do we have the technology to implement it or would we wait for excuses in such a grave situation too?

The best bet, perhaps, is a joint meeting between the stakeholders and technology experts to form a crisis plan to avoid such conflicts in future.

But then, we all know, how intelligent our bureaucratic system is...

Jatinder Singh, Principal Correspondent Light Reading India