Foreign firms operating in India will be charged double rates for SMS

Foreign firms operating in India will be charged $0.030 (Rs 2.23) per short message service (SMS) from July 16, which is double the current rates and nearly 20 times what telecom operators are charging domestic companies. is more. As a result, some foreign companies may be forced to look for alternative sources of communication, industry officials said.

Officials said foreign enterprises can resort to alternatives such as in-app notifications, email and WhatsApp business messaging, but telcos will still collect high revenue as mission-critical messages such as one-time passwords require SMS to be sent. . The new rates will apply to foreign banks including Amazon, Google, Facebook and Uber as well as Standard Chartered, HSBC, Citibank and Deutsche Bank.

An executive of a leading telemarketing company said, “The increase in prices will lead to some reduction in traffic. For example, most foreign banks have top-level customers who are regular users of WhatsApp and email. More than 40 billion SMS are sent every month by domestic entities as compared to one billion by foreign companies, which is now expected to decrease.”

However, a telecom company executive said that they do not expect any impact on SMS traffic as international enterprises have the ability to easily tolerate price hikes. He said on condition of anonymity, “India still has the lowest rates in the world. They are paying much higher prices in other markets, closer to $0.060.”

Many foreign enterprises are upset with telcos being categorized as ‘international’ despite levying different rates and using SMS for Indian customers.

Another telecom company executive said, “Any unit whose cloud servers are outside India and data of Indian customers is being processed by those external data centres is classified as international.” “Uber or Amazon may have subsidiaries in India, but whenever you book a taxi or place an order, it is processed by a server somewhere in the US.”

Amazon, Google, Facebook, Uber and Standard Chartered have yet to comment, while HSBC, Citibank and Deutsche Bank declined to comment. Vodafone Idea, Reliance Jio Infocomm and Bharti Airtel did not comment. TezzBuzz