Have been receiving sms codes: DT-BJP, TA-ICICI, AX-Airtel etc. What is it?

In order to protect interests of consumers receiving unsolicited commercial SMSes, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has mandated all mobile operators in India to prefix an identification tag before all application-to-peer (A2P) commercial bulk SMSes which would reveal the name of the service provider and location where the SMS originated along with the name of the company sending the SMS.

The alphanumeric identifier should be of the form XY-Name of the company where X stands for code allocated for the service provider while Y stands for the service area where the SMS is originating from.

For example, AT Citibank would mean that the SMS is sent through Airtel mobile network from Tamil Nadu by Citibank company.

Similarly VX stands for Vodafone -Karnataka, TA for Tata Teleservices-Andhra Pradesh, TM for Tata Teleservices-Mumbai, AM for Airtel-Mumbai, AX for Airtel-Karnataka etc.

The standard prefixes finalized by TRAI are incomprehensible to the common man. For example, Z stands for Maharashtra, X for Karnataka, E for Reliance Telecom, and P for Spice Telecom etc.