Airtel’s Spam Warning Feature Gets Two Important Updates

Airtel AI Spam Warning

Late last year, Airtel started rolling out a new anti-spam feature across its network — a backend AI system that flags potentially suspicious phone calls and text messages, displaying a simple “Airtel Warning: SPAM” tag on your screen when such activity is detected for incoming calls and SMS messages.

It’s one of those rare telecom upgrades that quietly improves day-to-day usability without requiring any action from the user. And it seems to have had some real impact. In an email sent to customers this week, Gopal Vittal (VC and MD, Airtel) shared that since the feature launched in September 2024, Airtel’s systems have flagged over 27.5 billion calls and more than 500 million SMS messages as suspicious.

The spam warning feature is now getting two notable enhancements:

1. International Spam Call Detection

According to Airtel, scammers quickly adapted to the initial rollout by switching to international numbers to continue spamming users. As a result, the telco says there’s been a 12% increase in spam calls originating from overseas in the last six months.

To counter that, Airtel has now extended its spam detection capability to international numbers as well. Starting April 21, 2025, users will see the same “Airtel Warning: SPAM” label even when the suspicious call is coming from outside India.

“Spammers started adopting even more innovative methods… using international numbers to make spam calls,” said Gopal Vittal. “We have enhanced our AI tool to now identify and mark suspicious numbers as spam, even from international locations.”

2. Spam Alerts in Regional Languages

Airtel also announced that spam warning messages will now appear in a range of Indian regional languages, based on user preference or system language. Supported languages include Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Urdu, and Punjabi, along with English.

This is a smart move — not everyone processes alerts in English effectively, especially when quick decision-making is needed to avoid a scam call.

“Many of you have told us to alert you in the language that you are comfortable in,” said Vittal. “This is why our spam warnings will now be communicated in [these languages] besides English.”

Airtel says it’s continuing to evolve this system based on usage patterns and feedback. If nothing else, it’s a sign that mobile networks are finally beginning to take the spam problem seriously — and putting actual tech muscle behind solving it.

Hopefully the improvements keep coming, at least enough that we no longer need to rely on Truecaller. I wonder if we’ll see something similar from Jio too in the coming months.

I missed this story from August by Pratap Vikram Singh, writing for The Ken:

Vi, India’s third largest telco, is on the verge of closure. Things reached a head when a letter from promoter Kumar Mangalam Birla to a govt official was leaked

and

The letter, dated 7 June, was sent from Aditya Birla Group chairperson Kumar Mangalam Birla to Cabinet Secretary Rajiv Gauba. In it, Birla pleaded for “immediate active support” from the government. Without this, he warned, the telco would be driven to “an irretrievable point of collapse.” Birla even offered to hand over his 27% stake in the company to the government or any entity chosen by it in order to ensure the company, India’s third largest telco, remained a going concern. Later media reports indicated that Vi had also conveyed this message to banks.

I can’t imagine how Vi is planning to survive in the market so excellently dominated by Airtel and Jio. Not only is Vi’s network piss-poor, their customer support isn’t any better either. And to make matters worse, the merger of Vodafone and Idea was like a self-inflicted leg wound in the midst of a 100m sprint.

People familiar with the matter said the company levied a penalty of around 50 times the commission paid on several retailers who violated the guidelines for the first time, and removed repeat offenders from the network besides imposing a fine on them.

This is in response to the massive Aadhaar-related fraud that came to light a few weeks ago.

[…] UIDAI imposed a fine of Rs 2.5 crore on Airtel for allegedly opening payment bank accounts for its mobile subscribers without consent. The report also notes that Airtel routed the LPG subsidies of 31 lakh users (payments worth Rs 190 crore) to their Airtel payment bank accounts instead of the beneficiaries’ original bank accounts.

It still boggles my mind all the crazy shit that Aadhaar has enabled to happen, so easily.

Airtel 4G Trials Launched in Mumbai

Airtel on Saturday officially rolled out 4G LTE trials in the Mumbai on Band 40, 2300MHz using the TD-LTE technology. The company has previously rolled out its 4G services in 23 other cities and over the weekend, it has also added Chennai, Hyderabad & Vishakhpatnam along with Mumbai to its list.

Existing and New Airtel customers with 4G compatible mobile handsets can upgrade their existing SIM cards to newer 4G U-SIMs for Free by visiting any nearest Airtel gallery or by ordering one from their website at http://airtel.in/4g. You can also check whether your handset & SIM are ready for the 4G network by visiting this page and entering your mobile number there.

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DoT Receives Legal Notice on Zero-Rating Plans of Telcos

[Indian Netizens and Internet Entrepreneurs Welfare Association (INIEWA)], created last month, has said in the notice that zero-rating plans are violating the licence condition under which telecom operators must give customers unrestricted access to the Internet.

64.91M Mobile Number Portability (MNP) Requests In India Till August 2012

64.91 million subscribers submitted number porting requests till the month of August, 2012, according to the Indian Telecom regulator TRAI. This is up from 59.30 million porting requests till July 2012, an increase of 9.45% month on month. However, this also means that of a total connection base of 908.35 million connections (701.88 million active), just 5.61 million connections sent port out requests during the month.

MNP was launched in Haryana on November 25, 2010 and was made available pan-India on January 2011. That’s close to 65 million requests in 20 months.