TPS meaning in Telecommunication ?

The Telephone Preference Service (TPS) is a UK register of domestic telephone numbers whose users have indicated that they do not wish to receive sales and marketing telephone calls. Registration is free of charge. The service is paid for by the direct marketing industry. There is a similar service for corporate users, the Corporate Telephone Preference Service (CTPS). Similar do not call lists are implemented in other countries.

It is a legal requirement that all organisations (including companies, charities, voluntary organisations and political parties) do not make such calls to numbers registered on the TPS unless consent has been given; however the TPS has no powers of enforcement, and a 2013 survey by the consumer association Which? found that people registered on the TPS list received twice as many marketing calls as those not on the list. Enforcement is the responsibility of the Information Commissioner, which until 2012 did not have suitable legal powers to act, but in 2012 acquired the power to impose fines of up to £500,000.

The TPS is the only such register that is enforced by law in the UK. It is regulated by Ofcom and enforced by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). It is run by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), the organisation grouping telemarketers, on behalf of Ofcom; neither Ofcom nor the government provide any funding.

Exemptions include people who have, often unwittingly, consented to be contacted, and calls purporting to be for market research.

The effectiveness of the TPS is limited. Enforcement is so lax that many organisations completely ignore it and do not check numbers. There is no control over calls from outside the UK; many of the most abusive and sometimes fraudulent calls originate from overseas. A spokesman for the Direct Marketing Association—who run the TPS—said in July 2012 that it had received a dramatic increase in complaints from telephone subscribers cold-called by telemarketing firms, and that some firms simply chose to ignore the rules. The DMA sent between 1,000-2,000 complaints to the Information Commissioner's Office each month, yet no penalty fines had been imposed in at least 18 months.

The head of the TPS said candidly about the service's failings, in a 2013 interview "I would completely understand if the Guardian [newspaper] wrote a 'TPS is broken' headline"

The similarly named Government Telephone Preference Scheme is quite different; it is a system used since 1952 by the General Post Office and its successor British Telecom for disabling outgoing calls from all landlines if the telephone network is overloaded during an emergency; only vital lines which are registered with the scheme may make outgoing calls when it is activated.