Team Blitz India
New Delhi: Telecom operators have increased SMS tariff by 25 per cent for overseas tech firms like Amazon, Google, Meta, and others, for sending messages to their customers in India.
The latest hike, which takes the tariff to Rs 4 per message, comes at a time when these firms have been expressing concern that the telcos overcharge them for sending SMS — one-time passwords (OTP), confirmation code, order updates — to their customers in India, media reports said on May 29.
Though these firms have operations in India, telcos charge them international long distance SMS rates because their servers located abroad are used to generate messages to consumers in India.
To avoid paying higher charges, companies like Amazon and Uber have lately reduced their volume of SMS and instead started communicating using their own apps or emails to communicate with their customers.
