[Koha] Bug 9021 does not work in India and needs to be mentioned as such in the docs

[Christopher Davis]

Indranil,

Thank you for the information.

Take care,

Christopher Davis, MLS
Systems & E-Services Librarian
Uintah County Library
cgdavis at uintah.utah.gov
(435) 789-0091 ext.261
uintahlibrary.org
basinlibraries.org
facebook.com/uintahcountylibrary


On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 11:19 PM, Indranil Das Gupta <indradg at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Need a spot of help from you good peeps at Bywater :)
>
> This post[1] from Kyle w.r.t bug 9021 is causing a whole bunch of
> confusion among the Indian users of Koha. SMS support is an obvious
> much sought after feature and Kyle's fix seems like a wonderful thing,
> except that for India it simply does not work and thus needs a
> exception disclaimer added to it.
>
> I request that the post be updated with a note like this : "This
> feature may not work at all in India due to Indian telecom rules.
> Users in India are strongly advised to explore their legal exposure in
> using this feature with a lawyer in India"
>
> @Nicole - when you expand the manual, this exception needs to be mentioned.
>
> Let me explain why. Warning long read. :)
>
> Due to the nature of legal and telecom regulatory framework in India,
> bug 9021 will for 99% of 500+ million cell phones in India. Briefly,
> we have a policy of "sender pays" - receiving texts is free, sending
> is not. That is the first blocker for the email to sms scheme. The
> facility is offered only on high cost business application packages
> where there is a reverse charge mechanism of making the recipient pay
> the data charge.
>
> Further TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) has clamped user
> to user (not system to user) smses at max of 200 per day, which makes
> it unsuitable for a busy circulation system. Further India has
> national number portability (NNP) - i.e. a cell phone user can shift
> from telco to telco, without a change of numbers. So these days it is
> often impossible to tell from number if say it is from Vodafone or
> Idea Cellular or Airtel (as user may have shifted between them, but
> kept the old number under NNP facility. This impacts the
> +91<10-digit-number>@telco.tld scheme of the patch.
>
> Further, under TRAI rules, promotional texts can be sent to only to
> cell phone users who are not listed in the national do-not-disturb
> (DND) list and only between 9 AM -- 9PM IST. Sending to non-DND and
> outside the time window is a fairly serious prosecutable criminal
> offence.
>
> System alerts and notification texts that need to be sent any time
> 24/7 have to be sent using what is called the "transactional route" by
> TRAI. Users (say a library) who want to send out these alerts have to
> do the following before they can send out a text:
>
> (a) sign up with a transactional bulk message service provider
>
> (b) register their sms templates with TRAI for approval
>
> (c) get their users (the text recipients) to opt-in
>
> Legally in India if you wanted to send e.g. an overdue alert to your
> user without clearing a,b and c above you can be open yourself up to
> criminal prosecution and as well as see action as perpetrator of a
> civil wrong. FWIW, SMSes sent user to user typically costs between 10
> - 30 times more than a transactional bulk sms text (system to user).
>
> BTW, the list that Nicole found lists a whole bunch of Indian service
> providers. Let me clarify that this is dated document and none of
> those Indian references work. They got their because about 8 - 10
> years back that sort of feature used to work in India as well. But as
> the number of spam texts ballooned this access was withdrawn.
>
>
>
> [1] http://bywatersolutions.com/2016/02/26/koha-sms/
>
> cheers
>
> --
> Indranil Das Gupta
>
> Phone : +91-98300-20971
> Blog    : http://indradg.randomink.org/blog
> IRC      : indradg on irc://irc.freenode.net
> Twitter : indradg
>
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