DLT Entity ID (PE ID): What It Is & How to Find It

1. What the entity ID is

Under TRAI's TCCCPR 2018 rules, the business that sends commercial messages is the Principal Entity, or Sender. You register once, and an entity registrar checks your PAN, business proofs and authorised person. Vi and BSNL publish a target of 72 working hours for this check. On approval, the registrar "will approve, register and activate the Entity ID on DLT".

Portals use different names for the same number. Jio's screens say PEID. Airtel's duplicate-PAN message asks for your "existing DLT Registration No." Format: MSG91 describes the ID as 19 digits, and its own published telemarketer ID (1302157225275643280) is 19 digits as well. No operator publishes a format specification.

2. Entity ID vs the other DLT IDs

Every message carries the PE ID, the header, the template ID and the chain of TM IDs that handled it. The scrubber checks that they belong together.

3. One registration covers every operator

The Vi and BSNL FAQs are explicit: "Each Principal Entity needs to register only once with any of the Access Provider to obtain an Entity ID", and the PE ID "will be unique across all telecom Access providers in India". Headers and templates you register under it are shared too, and so are whitelisted links: BSNL says CTAs "are propagated across all telecom operators".

Each legal entity registers separately, because the registration is tied to the business PAN. Airtel blocks a second registration on the same PAN: "You are already registered on DLT with the given PAN No. Please provide existing DLT Registration No." A group with three companies that each have their own PAN has three entity IDs, and each header belongs to exactly one of them.

4. Where each portal shows it

We cannot log in to other businesses' accounts, so the locations below come from MSG91's screenshot guide, plus what Airtel's own portal code shows. Treat them as Medium confidence; portals change layouts.

If you cannot log in, ask whoever sends your SMS: a gateway needs your entity ID to carry your traffic, so it will have it on file. Portal walkthroughs are in our Jio, Airtel, Vi and BSNL guides.

5. Check that an entity is registered

Operators publish who is registered. BSNL's portal home page links a daily "List of Principal Entities Registered in DLT" and "List of Headers" as PDFs, named like TRAI-ENTITY-REPORT-29-Oct-2026.pdf. Vi and MTNL publish the same lists, and Jio has a "List of PE & Headers on DLT". Search the PDF for your registered name. This is the quickest way to confirm a vendor really registered you, or to see who holds a header you wanted.

6. Keeping the entity ID active

An entity ID can be valid and still be refused because the registration behind it has lapsed:

• Renewal. Jio's fee is "₹5,900/year". It sends a reminder a month before expiry, and "failure to make the payment will result in disablement of DLT services". Vi gives PE registration "1 Year" validity with a 30-day grace period. Airtel calls its ₹5,900 renewal "mandatory to use DLT (scrubbing, aggregation, delivery)". BSNL's FAQ contradicts itself, calling the fee "one-time" in one place and giving a one-year validity in another.
• Self-certification. Jio requires PEs to "self-certify annually". Failure means "automatic suspension" of senders, headers and templates. Airtel requires header and template verification "for every quarter".
• Platform moves. MTNL has stopped new registrations while migrating to BSNL's DLT. QTL's PingConnect assets "have been successfully migrated to the STPL panel" (SmartPing), so log in there to confirm your details.

7. PE–TM chain binding

A chain is the declared path a message takes from your entity through each telemarketer (aggregator and delivery TM) to the operator. TRAI's direction of 20 August 2024 required traceability from 1 November 2024. After extensions to 30 November and 10 December, TRAI announced that "effective 11th December 2024, SMS traffic sent through unregistered paths is being rejected". About 1.13 lakh active PEs had to declare chains.

• Jio has "Telemarketer › Create new chain" and a "PE-TM chain summary" screen. In 2024 it warned that undeclared chains would see "all your SMS traffic … blocked".
• Airtel notifies the telemarketer by email to review a new PE–TM relationship.
• Vi publishes a separate PE-TM Chain Binding manual.

If the chain is missing, the 600-series code is 605 ENTITY_ID_NOT_ALLOWED_FOR_TM. When you change SMS provider, add the new provider's telemarketer to your chain before moving traffic. If you move to AvanceZone, we give you the telemarketer details to declare.

8. Using the entity ID in API calls

With the AvanceZone API, dlt_entity_id is optional: a string of up to 20 characters. Leave it out and the gateway uses the entity ID stored with your sender ID, then the one on your account. Pass it when one account sends for more than one registered entity:

<?php
$payload = [
    'sender_id'       => 'AVNZON',
    'recipient'       => '919876543210',
    'message'         => 'Your OTP for login is 482913. It is valid for 10 minutes. Do not share it with anyone. -AVNZON',
    'dlt_entity_id'   => '1234567890123456789',   // a string, never an int or float
    'dlt_template_id' => '1234567890123456780',
];

$ch = curl_init('https://whitelabled.securesmsc.com/api/v2/sms/send');
curl_setopt_array($ch, [
    CURLOPT_POST           => true,
    CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
    CURLOPT_TIMEOUT        => 15,
    CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER     => ['Authorization: Bearer ' . getenv('SMS_API_KEY'),
                               'Content-Type: application/json',
                               'Accept: application/json'],
    CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS     => json_encode($payload),
]);
echo curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

The IDs above are placeholders. Keep entity and template IDs as strings throughout your stack. JavaScript numbers lose precision after about 16 digits, and spreadsheets keep only 15, so a 19-digit ID read as a number comes back changed and is then rejected as invalid. More sending code is in our PHP SMS guide.

9. Why "invalid entity ID" happens

The full code tables are in our DLT error codes guide. New templates also need tagged variables: see variable tagging.

Related DLT guides

• DLT registration for bulk SMS, which covers getting the entity ID in the first place
• Transactional vs promotional SMS, before you register templates under it