Monday, June 1, 2009

Recently, from almost a month SMSs from Banks, Service Providers, Companies have started prefixing something like ID, AT, VK…etc. What’s all this afte

Recently, from almost a month SMSs from Banks, Service Providers, Companies have started prefixing something like ID, AT, VK…etc. What’s all this after all!!? Here I am to explain you what it is! Normally these SMSs originates from a Bulk SMS provider where you can use 11 digit Alpha-Numeric characters as "Sender". But there were some security risks in this method. I was able to give a phone number as "Sender" & it appears as that person at the recipient end. Basically there was a chance to send SMSs as a different person! I was actually using this to fool my friends.

But the new TRAI regulation insisted bulk SMS providers to restrict the "Sender ID" to 8 characters. Other three characters should be used to specify who is the service provider & where it’s originated from. Say for example: HDFCBANK sends an SMS to you using bulk SMS provider located at Tamil Nadu which uses Airtel. You will receive it as AT-HDFCBANK. First character specifies which service provider the message is being originated & the second character specifies from which location it’s originated. Here is the table which has details of these SMS codes:

Service Provider Codes:

Service Provider Code
Aircel, Dishnet Wireless D
Bharti Airtel A
BSNL B
BPL Mobile/Loop Telecom L
Datacom Solutions C
HFCL Infotel H
Idea Cellular I
MTNL M
Reliance Communications R
Reliance Telecom E
S tel S
Shyam Telecom Y
Spice Telecom P
Swan Telecom W
Tata Teleservices T
Unitech Group U
Vodafone Group V

Service Area Code
Andhra Pradesh A
Assam S
Bihar B
Delhi D
Gujarat G
Haryana H
Himachal Pradesh I
Jammu & Kashmir J
Karnataka X
Kerala L
Kolkata K
Madhya Pradesh Y
Maharashtra Z
Mumbai M
North East N
Orissa O
Punjab P
Rajasthan R
Tamil Nadu T
UP-East E
UP-West W
West Bengal V

So, combination of these two constitutes the first two digit of ?Sender? followed by an hyphen (-) & actual sender name.

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