Friday, September 4, 2009

Significance of codes appended to telemarketing SMSs

Recently, almost everyday we receive SMSs from Banks, Service Providers,etc & it must have come to our notice that companies have started prefixing something like ID, AT, VK…etc. What’s all this after all!!?

Normally these SMSs originates from a Bulk SMS provider where you can use 11 digit Alpha-Numeric characters as "Sender". But there were some security risks in this method.

TRAI regulation insisted bulk SMS providers to restrict the "Sender ID" to 8 characters. Other three characters should be used to specify who is the service provider & where it’s originated from. Say for example: HDFCBANK sends an SMS to you using bulk SMS provider located at Tamil Nadu which uses Airtel. You will receive it as AT-HDFCBANK. First character specifies which service provider the message is being originated & the second character specifies from which location it’s originated.

Service Provider Codes:


Service area Codes:

So, combination of these two constitutes the first two digit of ?Sender? followed by an hyphen (-) & actual sender name.






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