The consumers are bearing the brunt of the fights brewing among the telecom operators over SMS termination fee. The major contours that have emerged so far are- Airtel v/s Aircel, Airtel v/s Reliance Communications and Vodafone v/s Tata Services.

The dispute pertains to termination charges whichs are paid by an operator from whose network calls or SMS originate to the one on whose network these communications end.

Due to these disputes the SMSes that the consumers are sending remain undelivered. There is also an apprehension whether consumer ultimately are paying for these SMSs. Aircel has stopped its SMS service to Airtel, though it maintains that consumers are not being forced for these SMSes.
 
Airtel while referring to the tribunal TDSAT’s directive that the SMS interconnection agreement, which specifies the termination charges, should be signed between Airtel and Aircel, said that this is the precisely the reason why SMS service to Aircel has been blocked.
 
Aircel argues that it was all started by Bharti Airtel on November 9 and if the SMS is accepted but not delivered to an Aircel customer, the responsibility lies with the sender operator.
 
“Aircel is in no way responsible for customer inconvenience or the customer being charged for the message not going through to its recipient", it said.
 
Recently Tata Teleservices Ltd. (TTSL) has moved the tribunal TDSAT against Vodafone over latter’s demand for Rs 188 crore as SMS termination fee.

Vodafone had threatened TTSL through a termination notice that it would disconnect latter’s SMSes from its network if the amount is not paid by November 17. The matter is pending for hearing with the tribunal.

The issue will impact millions of customers if no immediate solution is found.

According to a Times of India report, Aircel has around 66.6 million subscribers whereas Airtel has more than 185.9 million subscribers as per the September data from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai). Vodafone has 152.6 million, Reliance 134.8 million and Tata 78.3 million customers.

TDSAT in an interim order last week has directed  Airtel to immediately restore the SMS interconnection of  Reliance Communications (RCom) on its network.