Truecaller says TRAI recommendation on CNAP ‘not competitive’ to its offerings

Direct Caller ID on telcos: Truecaller has welcomed the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI)’s recommendations on caller name presentations on CNAP, saying it will not be a competition to its suite of services.

The recognition of Caller ID as an important building block of the information communication economy is encouraging, it said, adding that number identification will end the menace of spam and scam calls.

Notably, Truecaller has 374 million users on its platform.

TRAI has recommended the government to issue suitable instructions for making the CNAP feature available in all devices sold in India after a cut-off date and once the recommendations are accepted. 

The identity of users should be determined on basis of what they fill in customer application forms, as per the recommendation. 

Truecaller is used by users currently to determine the identity of callers, and the move was seen as a competition to the external app service. Truecaller determines these identities using profiles made by users themselves, and public partnerships, it said.

Notably, the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) in 2023 had contended that the implementation of CNAP, keeping it optional for operators.

The grounds for the same were technical, privacy and cost-related concerns.

What do the Telcos have to say? 

Reliance Group's Jio in 2023 said in its response to TRAI's consultation paper that there are multiple technical and data privacy related concerns with this solution.

“There is no definitive record of feature phones being enabled with the CNAP feature. Further, the smart feature phone working on 4G networks also do not support this feature,” it added.

How this can be implemented for the devices currently in the market, would also require analysis at OEM (handset) level, the telco added.

“In a country where over 375 million users (over 350 million mobile nonbroadband users and over 25 million wireline users) are unlikely to possess a CNAP enabled device, in addition to a sizable portion of the wireless broadband users that may not be possessing CNAP enabled devices as well, it can safely be said that it should not be a mandatory service,” Reliance said.

Bharti Airtel said the service should only be considered for commercial uses, such as telemarketing.

It also said Peer-to-Peer (P2P) callers should be identified based on call and SMS patterns.

Vodafone Idea, on the other hand recommended for an alternate way of providing caller name information to consumers through a Common Mobile App (CMA), which can be built by a trusted party like C-DOT.

This will integrate the subscriber name database from all TSPs in a secured way, VIL said.