The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Tuesday released the recommendations on the Definition of International Traffic. These recommendations have been issued because so far, there was no clarity on transmission of SMS traffic on domestic and international routes.

TRAI recommended that ‘International Traffic’ means traffic originating in one country and terminating in another country, where one of the countries is India. It said the term ‘International SMS Message’ should be defined in the relevant telecommunication service licenses and authorisations as ‘international traffic delivered using SMS’. Similarly, the term ‘Domestic Traffic’ has to be defined in the relevant telecommunication service licenses and authorisations as ‘traffic originating and terminating within India’ and the term ‘Domestic SMS’ should be defined in the relevant telecommunication service licenses and authorisations as ‘domestic traffic delivered using SMS’.

The issuance of these recommendations was necessitated when, in 2021, TRAI received representations from two entities — one requesting TRAI to instruct telecom service providers (TSPs) to allow transmission of its SMS traffic under the domestic route and the other entity requesting it to provide a clarification to TSPs to route its transactional messages under domestic route as compared to an international route.

TRAI then requested the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) to peruse the requests and investigate whether the messages in question are domestic or international in nature. DoT replied by saying that no explicit Domestic and International SMS definition is available in License Agreements. “As per TRAI’s Telecommunication Interconnection Usage Charges Regulations, termination charges on domestic SMS are regulated while termination charges on International SMS are under forbearance. However, the definitions of domestic SMS and International SMS are not provided in TRAI regulations also,” said the DoT.

Therefore, TRAI decided to come out with the definitions.

TRAI said it has formulated its recommendations based on the views expressed by the stakeholders during the open house discussion , and its own internal analysis.

“The Authority is of the view that providing a definition of international traffic under the telecommunication service licenses/ authorisations will remove ambiguity on the treatment of telecommunication traffic by stakeholders,” it said.

“Any incoming application to person (A2P) SMS message shall be treated as an international SMS message, if it cannot be generated, transmitted or received without the use or intervention of any electronic device, computer system or computer application located outside India,” it said in the recommendations.

India is currently the world’s second-largest telecommunication services market. There were 1163.83 million wireless subscribers and 36.23 million wireline subscribers in the country as of 31.08.2024. The last two decades witnessed a remarkable growth in the telecommunication sector in the country.