Telecom operators have opposed the move to impose termination charges on the short messaging service fearing it would make it costlier and hinder growth.
At a recent Telecom Regulatory Authority of India discussion on interconnect usage charges for SMS, only Bharti Airtel seemed to be in favour of the move.
"The implementation of SMS termination should be mandated, as in several cases, bilateral negotiations have not been successful," Narender Gupta, director of legal and regulatory affairs at Bharti Airtel, said. He wanted termination charges to be on a cost-plus basis.
A Hutch Essar official added, "IUC (interconnection usage charge) per message would work out to less than 1 paise."
VSNL, on its part, has asked for carrier charges saying it provided infrastructure for carrying certain types of messages, that formed more than 70 per cent of SMS flow on its signaling network.
In response, Trai has proposed to regulate termination charges for SMSs.
This has come in the wake of data that suggested more ground needed to be covered before cost-based tariffs could be implemented. Advocates of lower SMS charges have suggested that given the huge volumes, estimated at 100 million a day, costs incurred by operators were just 1-2 paise.
Telecom analysts said that sending an SMS involved only the cost of the SMS server and signaling because it did not take the voice path, sufficient bandwidth being available on the radio network.
However, with SMSs being extremely popular, traffic imbalance among operators and increasing third party usage of the medium for advertisements and commercial reasons, Trai feels there are grounds to regulate the termination charge for SMSs.
The Trai consultation paper raises the possibility of bringing down tariff of premium rate SMSs, which usually range from Rs 2 to Rs 5 a message. In general, retail tariffs for local SMSs range from 40 paise to Re 1.
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