Seems like Indian Government took an insane move of 5 SMS per day for the next 15 days starting from 18th of August ie., GSM & CDMA users can send only 5 SMS per day & after that, all the messages won’t get delivered and sometimes get back a reply from provider : “Hi! You have sent 5 SMS today. As per Govt. guidelines, you can’t send more than 5 SMS today. Your SMS services will be resumed post Midnight.”
Also Govt. also announced that more than 20KB of data cannot be used nor can’t send more than 5 MMS. Well this rules has not been applied to many parts of India yet.
These rules are disappointing to youngsters since they cannot send more than 5 SMS since there was already another limit of 200 per day!
For my case, on 18th of Aug. from Vodafone, I couldn’t even send 1 SMS & today i could send 5 SMS, I have also tested my data connection and could download/upload about 300MB which is more than 20KB of course, and still its not restricted.
The move was made by TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) to curb the spread of rumors which was meant to spread fear and to vacate North Eastern Indian’s from certain states. Home Ministry said that the rumors led to the flee of North East Indian’s from states like Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharashtra and hence the move was necessary. The rumor SMSs contained misleading information related to Assam Violence. The Home Ministry has asked Department of Telecommunications to implement the order through the telecom operators. The ban came into force after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said that spread of rumours by miscreants had led to people belonging to the north east to flee from Bangalore, Pune and some other parts of the country.
There is no news about the SMS packs users have installed as they won’t be getting refund nor the plan’s validity won’t be extended further.
These limits does not apply to transaction SMS related to Banking, Financial Institutions and Railway alerts & Facebook SMS Alerts are still working but we cannot reply them as they are too counted in 5 SMS limit.
During these days, I’d suggest you to use WhatsApp or eBuddy XMS for your mobile to connect with users since it’s an SMS like app but needs GPRS/WiFi to be able to use.