Prime Highlights :
- Oman has restricted promotional calls and messages to between 8am and 9pm.
- Violations can attract fines of up to RO30,000, doubling for repeat offences.
Key Facts :
- Oman’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority oversees the country’s telecom and consumer protection rules.
- Businesses have six months to comply with the new regulations.
Background :
The Oman Telecommunications Regulatory Authority has enacted new rules on promotional and service calls, SMS and value-added services, including contact hours, caller identification, consumer opt-outs and the responsibility and duties of the telecoms operators to identify and prevent spam and fraud. Entities subject to the rules will have 6 months to become compliant.
The rules state that promotional calls and messages are allowed to be sent between 08:00 and 09:00 local time in Oman, except for those sent in this timeframe but received afterwards due to technical issues. The measure seeks to curb intrusive marketing outside of business hours, and establish a benchmark for telecom businesses.
There are also tighter identity requirements with the rules. Promotional SMS sender ID should match the commercial or legal name of the sender and have a prefix of “AD”, and for promotional services and automated calls, the caller ID should show the corporate name. Businesses cannot use telephone numbers registered to people for these calls, and it will be easier for the recipient to know who is calling them.
Licensed telecom operators should make it easy to enable users to reject promotional calls, messages and value-added services, either on a global or individual basis. Customers should be able to report continued contact after opting out and revoking such contact at a later time. The operator must have a single database for effective and consistent handling of such preferences.
The regulations also impose more stringent responsibilities on operators to cut down harmful communication, block suspected communication, including that originating from outside Oman through systems, as well as behavioural monitoring and a single portal for reporting communication to the customer.
Violations are subject to penalties of up to RO30,000, with the fines doubling for repeat violations in a year, and some violations being based on sender ID or per day.
