DoT (Department of Telecommunications) To stop the increasing online fraud, USSD based call forwarding service has been stopped from today. Recently, the Department of Telecommunications had issued a circular to telecom companies Airtel, Jio, Vi, BSNL regarding this. In its notice issued on March 28, the Department of Telecommunications had issued orders to the telecom companies to stop the USSD based call forwarding facility from 15th April 2024 i.e. from today till further orders. Users will no longer be able to enjoy call forwarding facility by dialing USSD code in their mobile phones.
What is USSD?
Be it a feature phone or a smartphone user, everyone must have used USSD based services at some point or the other. USSD is called Unstructured Supplementary Service Data Based Service, in which users can select the service by dialing some numbers in the dial pad of their phone. For example, to know the IMEI number of their phone, users dial *#06# USSD code from their phone.
Similarly, a USSD code was also being used to activate and deactivate the call forwarding service, which has now been discontinued. Users had to dial this code to forward the call from their number to some other number. After this, the calls coming on the users’ phones were transferred to some other number.
DoT stopped service for this reason
What do we do now?
If you want to activate call forwarding service in your mobile, then for this you will have to go to the phone’s settings and go to call settings. After this you will see the option of call forwarding. In this way, feature phone and smartphone users will be able to activate the call forwarding service by going to the device.