The Telecommunication Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) said in a statement,“Based on representations from service providers and consumers to raise the daily limit on SMSes from 100 per day per SIM, the authority has decided to increase it to 200 SMSes per day per SIM.

To discourage unsolicited SMSes from telemarketers, the telecom regulator had pegged the number of SMSes that can be sent in a day at 100. There are no restrictions on commercial SMSes sent by telemarketing companies registered with Trai.

Trai also suggested the complete removal of termination charges by 2014, although it is subject to the decision of the Supreme Court. Termination charges, a part of interconnection usage charges, are a levy paid by one operator to another on whose network a call ends. Any change in these levies will impact mobile tariffs. Currently, termination charge is 20 paise per minute and is a part of mobile tariff.

The move to reduce the fee has been opposed by incumbent operators as they stand to lose revenue. But new players are in favour of lower termination rates because their net outflow of traffic is more than incoming calls.

The Supreme Court had directed Trai to evolve a new set of interconnection charges between operators for carrying calls of one network through others. The apex court direction was on a petition by Trai challenging the Telecom Disputes Settlement & Appellate Tribunal order, which had set aside the Trai’s Interconnection Usage Charges (Regulation), 2009, following objection by various mobile service providers.

It had also raised the MTC for incoming international calls to 40 paise per minute from 30 paise, while limiting carriage fee to 65 paise a minute for domestic long-distance calls.