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Vietnam agency mulls 50 mobile text message cap to fight spam

Vietnam agency mulls 50 mobile text message cap to fight spam

Tuesday, June 16, 2015, 12:42 GMT+7

An agency under the Vietnamese Ministry of Information and Communications believes the best way to combat SMS spam is to ban everyone from sending more than 50 text messages a day.

Limits should be set for local mobile phone users and those who cross the lines without permission will have their service suspended by the network carriers, the Agency for Information Security said in a draft decree on how to detect and stop SMS spammers.

The agency suggested that each subscriber should be allowed to send a maximum of five text messages in five minutes, and should not be permitted to send more than 20 SMSes in an hour, or over 50 text messages a day.

These caps will be set by the Ministry of Information and Communications, which may adjust them in different periods to “suit the reality,” the agency said.

Subscribers who want to text more than the limits must register with their mobile carriers, and those who break the ceilings without doing so will have their service suspended, according to the draft decree.

The network carriers must prohibit violators from sending messages and making phone calls.

The proposed SMS limits have faced objections from local telecom firms, who say they will hurt certain groups of subscribers.

For Viettel, the limits will mostly affect its subscribers who are youngsters and students.

“These [customers] can send as many as 300 text messages a day,” VnExpress quoted a Viettel representative as saying.

“We will suffer earnings losses if these subscribers are allowed to send 50 messages per day at most.”

The military-run mobile carrier is carrying out a promotional program allowing subscribers to send 100 SMSes for only VND2,500.

An SMS normally costs VND250-350, depending on network operators and data plans.

Viettel thus suggested that only the interval of the SMS sending time should be capped, rather than the number of text messages.

A representative from Vietnamobile said it is inconvenient to require subscribers to register to send more texts than they are permitted to, as they are not normally required to do so.

A Vinaphone spokesperson, meanwhile, pointed out another concern: the SMS limits may drive many subscribers to use Internet-based texting apps, which enable them to send unlimited messages for free while eating into the earnings of mobile carriers.

But these limits are still in the form of propositions, and the Ministry of Information and Communications has said they will not be immediately applied.

The ministry has also asked mobile carriers to strengthen their technical measures to combat SMS spam, and have stricter sanctions for those who bombard people with unwanted messages.

As in many other countries, SMS spam is a headache for mobile users and regulatory agencies in Vietnam. It costs less than VND100,000 to buy a new SIM card with more money in the account balance than its price.

It is stipulated that subscribers register their valid personal information, such as ID numbers, to activate a new SIM card, but this anti-spam measure is not really effective.

“There are a huge number of new subscribers, and there is no available database to check if the ID cards [spammers] use during registration are valid,” Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc admitted as he addressed a law-making National Assembly meeting last weekend.

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