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Display names of callers, suggests Trai helobaba.com

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NEW DELHI: In a fresh move seeking to tackle pesky calls and control frauds through mobile phones, telecom regulator Trai on Friday recommended that names of callers should be displayed in incoming calls. And, details of caller can be fetched from Customer Application Form (CAF), Trai said, as it recommended the measure to the department of telecom.
Pesky, fraudulent calls, unsolicited customer communication have been a headache for customers and govt. Many steps taken in this direction have failed to yield desired results.
“Telephone consumers, at various fora, have raised concern that in absence of calling party name presentation service, they prefer not to attend calls from unknown numbers, as most of such calls are unsolicited commercial communications from un-registered telemarketers. As a result, even genuine telephone calls may go unanswered,” Trai said, adding that telephone consumers have also raised their concern in respect of robocalls, spam calls and fraudulent calls.
At present, there are not many solutions to the menace, though companies and govt have tried to control it. Smartphone users make use of native tools and third-party apps to identify the calling party name and mark spam calls. For example, Apple offers a ‘silence unknown callers’ feature on iPhones. The Google Phone app for Android has a ‘caller ID and spam’ protection feature that allows phone users to mark incoming calls as spam. Also, third-party apps like ‘Truecaller’ and ‘Bharat Caller ID & Anti-spam’ also provide calling party name identification and spam identification facilities.
Trai says these measures have broadly been ineffective. “Generally, native smartphone tools and third-party apps provide name identification services based on crowd-sourced data. However, the crowd-sourced name identity information may not be reliable, in many instances”.
In its recommendations, Trai said “Calling Name Presentation (CNAP) Supplementary Service” should be introduced for Indian telecom users. All access service providers should provide the service to their telephone subscribers upon request.”
The govt should issue suitable instructions for making CNAP feature available in all devices sold in India after a suitable cut-off date, once recommendations are accepted, Trai said.

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