The TRAI has pulled up Bharti Airtel for violating the national numbering plan that designates short codes and numbers for value-added services.
Told to stop some of them immediately
NEW DELHI: The Telecom Regulatory and Development Authority (Trai) has pulled up Bharti Airtel for violating the national numbering plan that designates short codes and numbers for value-added services.
It has asked the company to immediately discontinue such services like the Marathi Mobile Radio, Devotional Service and Ringtone Genie in Maharashtra and Goa.
Trai asked Bharti to comply with the national numbering plan as specified in its licence, in a week.
Among the other services that will have to be discontinued are Voice Chat in Bihar and UP, Airtel FM in UP, Live Counselling Portal and Ibadat Portal in J&K, Free Hello Tunes Subscription and Khel Khel Mein Kammal in Rajasthan and Devotional Portal in Himachal Pradesh.
Allocation of new short codes such as 694, 64684, 30308888, 676, 696, 630063, 3300, 6300, 69650 and 646464 by Bharti for value-added features is in "violation of the national numbering plan", Trai said.
According to a Bharti spokesperson , "The industry was given time by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) till August 31, up to which both the new and old short codes should be used simultaneously As per DoT's order to the industry and Trai direction, we will be fully compliant with the national numbering plan involving five-digit short codes by August 31."
As per government guidelines, all service providers must use level 5 for short codes to content providers, including SMS-based services within their network.
It also states that the existing 4-digit short codes should be changed to 5-digit ones by prefixing them with 5.
The existing 5 and 6-digit short codes, it says, should be migrated to 5-digit codes, by replacing the first or first two digits respectively by 5 and so on.
Although parallel working of old and new codes is allowed up to August 31, service operators are not allowed to allocate new short codes.
The national plan, issued by the Department of Telecommunications, includes national numbering, routing and transmission plan.
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