In a move to check fraudulent and spam calls on mobile phones, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has asked for views from stakeholders on whether caller identity display on smartphones must be made available to all consumers as a mandatory supplementary service to stop spam and scan calls or not. TRAI wants feedback about whether existing telecom networks already support this provision of calling name presentation service (CNAP) or not. Whether landlines and smartphones in India already have CNAP or not, is a question that has been asked.
DoT in July 2022 suggested the inclusion of this CNAP facility to empower users to take informed decisions while receiving any incoming calls and also reduce any kind of harassment from spam/fake calls. DoT had said, “to facilitate CNAP feature to all telephone subscribers in India, telecom network readiness and feasibility needed to be explored so that CNAP can be implemented in multi-technology networks across telecom service providers.”
Not only CNAP, but TRAI has also asked if the name and identity information provided by consumers in the customer acquisition forms should also be used for the CNAP database setup or not. The deadlines for comments and counter comments are set to be the 27th of December 2022 and the 10th of January 2023 respectively.
Recently, Telecom Minister Ashwini Vaishnav talked about the feature and said that the one who is receiving the call should know who’s making it. It can be any kind of call like a regular voice call, WhatsApp call, facetime, etc, the feature should apply to all calls.
TRAI has also suggested multiple ways to implement the CNAP service and asked for suggestions on the same. One of the models is a telecom company maintaining a CNAP database of its customers and subsequently, the name information is shared by the telco, on whose network a call is originating, with the destination telco on whose network the call is terminating.
2nd suggestion is getting a third party to operate a centralized CNAP database with an update mechanism from each telco with respect to their subscribers. TRAI has also asked for suggestions on steps needed to ensure delivery of CNAP service to a called party without a considerable rise in the call set-up time. TRAI has asked if outgoing calls must be permitted from national toll-free numbers and if yes, whether the CNAP service should also be activated for such numbers. Similarly, TRAI wants to know whether the CNAP should be implemented for 140-level numbers allocated to registered telemarketers and if there is a need to amend any telecommunication service licenses to implement the CNAP service.
At present, there are apps like Truecaller and Bharat Caller ID & Anti-spam which provide calling party name identification and spam identification facilities, but the names based on crowdsources are not truly reliable.
It is really great service from Trai to implement blank caller identify. Which gives customers to take calls with confidence and reject it if they found not necessary. This can avoid many fraud calls and harassment from the caller.