The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has imposed new SMS termination charges for retail consumers and commercial messages. Termination charge is paid by the operator where the SMS originates to the operator to which the message is delivered. TRAI did not set a particular charge for this hence some operators were charging 10 paise as termination charges. Now they have set the SMS termination charge as 2 paise for normal SMS and 5 paise on transactional SMS on operators from whom the SMS originates.
The 5 paise SMS termination charges was already present for promotional messages since a regulation in 2010. Now, it will also be applicable for transactional messages, which also falls under commercial communications category. This move is to prevent pesky SMS. (TRAI) imposed the restriction of 100 SMS/ day per SIM recently to prevent pesky marketing SMS.
Transactional SMSes originating from the government organisations will be exempted from the termination charges. These new regulations would be applicable from 1st June 2013.