Dhaka — The Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) has come up with a way to get rid of the hassle of promotional texting on mobile phones from telcos.
The commission has launched the ‘Do Not Disturb’ or ‘DND’ service, which people will now be able to use to block short messages sent by telcos promoting their products and services.
However, due to a lack of publicity and awareness, many people do not know about the service and suffer from unwanted SMS.
Customers have also complained to the BTRC about the issue. Several years ago, BTRC instructed the mobile phone operators to keep the option of turning off these SMS for the customer and the operators have kept it.
On Saturday, they started broadcasting the details of the service in the media. BTRC says that promotional SMS or campaigns help mobile operators to know about new services on a daily basis.
So, customers should take the ‘Do Not Disturb’ service to stop this.
If a user does not want to receive promotional SMS, he/she can dial Grameenphone * 121 * 1101 #, Banglalink * 121 * 8 * 6 # and Robi and Airtel * 7 #.
Mohammad Didarul Islam, who has been getting frequent SMSs said, “Every day I used to get nearly 20 SMS. I was exhausted by this, luckily after knowing this I will be able to control the flow of promotional and non-relevant SMS”
Another user Nusrat Tasnim from Dhaka said, “Every morning I used to get a bulk of SMS, I hope the system will work in the future. The SIM companies should consider user experience”
Mentioning promotional SMS, Bishal Sarker said, “My smartphone gets tired with all these unwanted promotional messages. Every time notification lights blink, I unlock and I find it’s a promotional text,”
Earlier, the Parliamentary Committee on the Ministry of Telecommunications and Information Technology had directed in October 2018 to be strict in protecting consumers from the harassment of SMS even after midnight.
The BTRC has also taken steps accordingly. However, a few days ago, the BTRC had instructed the customers not to send any SMS from 12 midnight to dawn.
