Friday, December 07, 2007

'Do Disturb' Regsitry

A country which has more phones then water hand-pumps or clean toilets or almost every other thing really needed a 'Do No Disturb' registry. This is effective from Sep1,2007 and all telecom service providers need to maintain this registry. If you are registered and you get a call then you can complain and there are fines for first fault and greater fines for subsequent faults.

So far so good.

There is no single registry so its a sort of pain, more so when in future we are talking about no portability and so on, but better then not having any thing.

So why I am writing it all here, we all know it, whats new. Well, couple of weekends back I was driving at about 100 KMPH on a not so great highway, between Ambala and Zirakpur, the other important thing was I was driving a big car and the power-assist of brakes were not working. Which means that I was much more alert and tired because it used to take lot of effort to stop the car at times. It was early morning, other passengers were either sleepy or dis-interested, so amid all this a bulb flashed and I thought that why not have a 'Do Disturb' registry. Instead of asking everyone to get added, we would rather do the opposite. It would be nightmarish for tele-callers since the default would be NO, and I doubt how many of us would take the pain to add them selves to 'Do Disturb' registry.

Noble thought.

The other aspect of this could be that there could indeed be folks who do not mind an occasional call for a bargain-deal or about an exciting housing project. And probably by adding some inducing-factor, we can actually motivate people to get added. This inducement could be in the form of
- Get added to 'Do Disturb' and get 15 SMSes free
- Or Get added and receive three caller tunes free

Once such a database is up then we can give access to this DB to telemarketers for a service fee. Also mechanisms could be put in place such that a subscriber to DoDisturb doesn't receive more then 3 calls a month or a some golden no. To scale this system, we can have ip-telephony software and one can call only using that s/w so we also rope-in telecom providers. I am sure if I create such a registry today, we would definitely get some good ideas and can evolve and refine this.

But I think its a decent thought to be pondered more.

2 comments:

Vibha said...

A few more possible details: The registry could possibly allow the user to specify the frequency with which the user can be "disturbed" and gives incentives based on that. So if a user specifies a frequency of twice a week, the reward could be 30 Sms as opposed to 15 smses for a user who specifies the frequency of once a week.
How does this sound?

Nandan Jha said...

Today I read that Supreme Court has asked government to make such a registry. Its been just over 9-10 months when I first shared this. :)