In a good news for the Truecaller app, telecom operators have informed the department of telecommunications (DoT) that they can display a caller’s identity on an user’s phone screen only within their own network. This means subscribers will continue to be dependent on Truecaller to find out the identity of all anonymous callers.
The telcos’ submission means that if an Airtel subscriber calls another Airtel user, the caller’s name will get displayed, but the same will not happen if the same subscriber calls a Jio or Vodafone Idea user.
The reason for this partial success of the calling name presentation (CNAP) feature is due to some technical constraints such as circuit switching as well as the reluctance of telcos to share their consumer database with each other. “It is not possible to implement CNAP at this stage when calls are made between two networks,” an executive at a telecom operator said. Further, this feature will not work on 2G phones, the executive added.
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It is therefore likely that the government will implement CNAP in phases, with the first being where names are displayed on calls made within a network, official sources said.
“We have done trials and will be ready to implement CNAP, but it will be limited to our database. We cannot display the names if they are on other networks until the operator concerned shares the data with us,” Jagbir Singh, chief technology officer at Vodafone Idea, told FE.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) had in February recommended that DoT should mandate the caller name identification feature in the telecom network. With the rollout of this feature, users would be able to see the name of anonymous callers on their phone screens, which in a way would have also helped in curbing financial frauds and spams.
Bharti Airtel recently launched its own AI-powered, real-time network solution for spam detection. The solution helps customers know suspected spam calls and messages. “Airtel’s solution is way better than what apps like Truecaller or the government’s proposed caller name presentation (CNAP) services are providing or aim to provide,” MD & CEO Gopal Vittal had said at the time of the launch.
According to Vittal, CNAP is a solution which will identify a user but a spamster will get by. It will not help in person-to-person calling where most of the frauds happen, but will be a good solution for B2B to identify which company is calling.
For displaying a caller’s name, telecom operators will use the details available in the customer application form (CAF), which every user needs to fill for taking a phone connection.