Trai Working On ‘Trucaller-Like’ Caller ID Feature; Need To Address Spam Calls: Secy V Ranghunandan
If you get baffled when you get a call from an unknown number again and again, don’t worry – there is a good news for you as this problem will get resolved very soon. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has said that it is working on a new “truecaller-like” caller ID feature that will enable users see the name of the caller instead of number as is the case currently.
Speaking to Business Today, Trai secretary V Ranghunandan said: “We have this reference from the Department of Telecommunication (DoT) to have new mechanism that will show the KYC-based names on users’ phone displays, whenever they receive a call. We are discussing with service providers, and we are working on this…We need to continuously track spam calls in India.”
According to Truecaller, in 2021, India ranked fourth amongst all the countries that received the most spam calls.
Talking about the spam calls, the secretary said: “We have already some regulatory mechanism as far as the spam calls are concerned, we are working with the service providers to make it more and more effective. There are technology solutions like AI etc which service providers can us.”
“We are in talks with service providers regarding this as well. Spam calls need to be continuously addressed. We have to keep a continuous track on Spam calls and find continuous solutions,” Raghunandan said.
Few days ago, the DoT had reportedly reached out to the telecom regulator for its opinion on developing a framework to regulate internet calling and messaging apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, and others. However, Raghunandan said that there was nothing from the DoT on regulating internet calling.
Throwing light on the price of 5G services, the Trai secretary said that he is hoping it to be affordable.
Talking about quality of service being provided by the service providers, Raghunanadan said: “We have comprehensive regulations with regard to quality of service. We had prescribed financial disincentives when there is a slight deviation on compliance. Now, we have found that it is not high and is fairly satisfactory. All the reports that we have gotten so far from states are fairly good. This means that quality of services is fairly good now.”
