You have been receiving SMS codes: TA-ICICI, AX-Airtel… and wondering what’s it?

Recently, from almost a month SMSs from Banks, Service Providers, Companies have started prefixing something like ID, AT, VK…etc. What’s all this after all!!? Lets see what it is! Normally these SMSs originates from a Bulk SMS provider where you can use 11 digit Alpha-Numeric characters as “Sender”.

But there were some security risks in this method. I was able to give a phone number as “Sender” & it appears as that person at the recipient end. Basically there was a chance to send SMSs as a different person! was actually using this to fool friends??.But the new TRAI regulation insisted bulk SMS providers to restrict the “Sender ID” to 8 characters. Other three characters should be used to specify who is the service provider & where it’s originated from. Say for example: HDFCBANK sends an SMS to you using bulk SMS provider located at Tamil Nadu which uses Airtel. You will receive it as AT-HDFCBANK. First character specifies which service provider the message is being originated & the second character specifies from which location it’s originated. Here is the table which has details of these SMS codes: Service Provider Codes:

Service Provider Code

Aircel, Dishnet Wireless D
Bharti Airtel A
BSNL B
BPL Mobile/Loop Telecom L
Datacom Solutions C
HFCL Infotel H
Idea Cellular I
MTNL M
Reliance Communications R
Reliance Telecom E
S tel S
Shyam Telecom Y
Spice Telecom P
Swan Telecom W
Tata Teleservices T
Unitech Group U
Vodafone Group V

Service Area Code
Andhra Pradesh A
Assam S
Bihar B
Delhi D
Gujarat G
Haryana H
Himachal Pradesh I
Jammu & Kashmir J
Karnataka X
Kerala L
Kolkata K
Madhya Pradesh Y
Maharashtra Z
Mumbai M
North East N
Orissa O
Punjab P
Rajasthan R
Tamil Nadu T
UP-East E
UP-West W
West Bengal V

So, combination of these two constitutes the first two digit of Sender followed by an hyphen (-) & actual sender name. This help to regulate DNB (Do not distrub) registery.