Telecom companies increased SMS rates for foreign businesses like Google, Meta, Amazon, and others. For companies sending messages to Indian customers from overseas, the SMS tariffs have increased by 25%. According to media reports, each message will cost the companies $4. The choice was made at a time when foreign companies have voiced concerns that Indian telcos like Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel, and Vi overcharge them for sending SMS to Indian customers, including OTP, confirmation codes, and other updates.
Recently, there has been a decrease in the amount of SMS and emails sent to and received from Indian customers by Amazon and Uber. Due to the fact that their servers are located in India and they have an India subsidiary, the companies have pounded on the doors of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) to impose domestic rates on them.
One of the foreign companies that pushed telecom regulators to accept domestic rates is Amazon. It stated that SMSes come from Indian servers and are local. Since 2019, the e-commerce platform has lobbied TRAI.
Amazon heavily relies on SMS/text messages in India for a number of notifications, including login, financial transactions, delivery orders, etc. Millions of dollars are also spent by Meta to communicate with its Indian audience.
However, according to The Ken, Amazon alone is responsible for about 20% of all international text message traffic. Recently, Paytm and Google Pay also announced plans to switch from SMS alerts to app notifications for customers’ bank transactions.
In contrast to foreign companies, Indian telcos have argued that international companies should be charged international rates because they host their application and user databases outside of India and use those databases to communicate with servers in India.
