So, the Indian government went ahead and did something which only it can do best. It setup a new regulation which certainly made it much harder for people running a honest business :). Whether the new regulation will stop SMS/Voice spam is yet to be seen. More information and discussion about this can be found at http://www.medianama.com/2011/09/223-the-impossibility-of-trais-sms-spam-regulations-anonymous/ and http://www.medianama.com/2011/09/223-what-mobile-marketing-sms-cos-think-of-trais-sms-spam-regulations/

From KooKoo's perspective it does not affect us too much as most of the KooKoo (http://www.kookoo.in) apps are inbound apps. But we do have certain apps which allow subscribers to register for alerts and sms/voice alerts have to be sent to them. For now, we are not allowing any outbound calls/sms to NCPR registered numbers until things clear up a bit and we are really sorry for the inconvenience.

For affected businesses we suggest the following work around. Move your data distribution channel from a push based solution to a pull based solution.

Lets say you currently have some code which loops through list of phone numbers and sends an SMS to them, we have to update our code to receive an incoming and play the text to the caller based on the callers phone  number.

For example:

Your current pseudo code could look like:

for(i=0;i<num_of_clients;i++)
{
sendsms(client[i],message[i])//send message[i] to client[i]
}

This should be changed to :

$r=new Response();
if($_REQUEST['event']=="NewCall")
{
$message=getMessage($_REQUEST['cid']);//get message for caller id
$r->playtext($message);
$r->send();
}

So in 5 lines of code you can enable an inbound channel for your data distribution. If you have queries and would like help in porting your solution do mail us at support@kookoo.in

Obviously, this will not work for spammers ;) and you still need to get your clients to call your number. Though this may not be the best solution for now at least you can enable your data flow in some channels.