SMS Blackout Days Active on 31st Dec and 1st Jan by Telecom Operators

The last day of the year 2011 (31st December) and first day of the New year 2012 (1st January) is being taken as SMS Blackout Days by most of the Indian telecom operators. On this day’s standard SMS charges are applicable and you can send unlimited SMS, no restriction of 200 SMS per day on that. So you have option to send unlimited SMS to your friends but for each SMS you need to pay the standard sms rates. Your special SMS pack recharges will not work on this days. The standard SMS now will cost from a  range of 0.6paise to Rs 1 for the local and national SMS send.

2 days ago only Hon’ble Madras High Court issued a notices to TRAI and 10 telecom operators asking to bar such extra charges. This notice came while High court accepting a petition by a lawyer Arunachalam, seeking direction to the companies and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) not to hike the tariff for this period. HighCourt has sent notices to TRAI chairperson and Zonal/Regional Managers of 10 telecom companies, including Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, Reliance, Idea Cellular, Tata Docomo, MTS Mobile, BSNL and Videocon. Further hearing will be took place on January 21 2012.

Checkout Aircel Twitter response on this blackout days –

So it seems we need to wait till January 21 2012 for the High Court decision on this blackout days from Telecom operators.  Till then for this blackout days you have to opt for other means of sending new year messages to your loved ones. You can try using popular online SMS sending sites like 160by2 and way2Sms, they allow you to send unlimited SMS (140charaters). Also most of your friends probably will be online always, then you can send them messages through Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus or through Email.