A battle is reportedly brewing between Indian telecom companies Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea on the one hand and multi national companies like Amazon operating in the country on the other. The reason for the tiff is the definition of international SMS and telecom traffic.

According to a report in Economic Times, battle lines were drawn following a paper floated by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) that said business entities had sought a definition of international SMSes and telecom traffic to provide clarity. Messages sent from overseas are charged 5 cents (Rs 4.10) while domestic ones cost 13 paise.
In its comments on the discussion paper, Amazon reportedly contended that technological advancements have led to solutions that operate prior to the generation of the actual message that do not interact with any telecom network. “Given that termination charges for SMS are passed on to the (enterprise) customers, the lack of clarity on ‘international SMS’ and ‘domestic SMS’ allows TSPs (telecom service providers) to adopt their own interpretation and categorise a message generated by a computer resource/ server located outside India as ‘international SMS’, in spite of the origination and termination of the SMS being limited to the network of TSPs in India, to bring it under the scope of forbearance,” Amazon said in its comment.

Jio calls it attempt to justify non-compliance of regulatory requirements
Disputing this Jio said, “It is worthwhile to mention here that stakeholders who previously hesitated to disclose their call flow are now acknowledging that their messages originate outside India.” “They are now attempting to justify their non-compliance with regulatory requirements by claiming it is due to technological advancements and consumer benefit,” it further claimed.
Vodafone terms it ‘akin to fraud’
Vodafpne said that this is akin to fraud. “We reiterate that such masquerading of International SMS as domestic SMS (through A2P or P2P route) is akin to gray voice call frauds where International calls were terminated on end Indian consumers as domestic calls, due to commercial gains and was quite prevalent in past,” the telco said. It went on to add, “The technological advancement cited by the global giants in their responses would make any definition of international SMS redundant and generic in the coming years.”