Telecom regulators have intensified their crackdown on spam short messages as mobile phone users complain of getting up to 641 million junk texts a day. (Not each, you understand. All users lumped together.)
Telecom operators have joined the regulators in the fight, with China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom signing an agreement to deal with inter-network spam messages.
The agreement among the country’s three main mobile network operators will limit the number of messages that can be sent from a phone number in an hour to 200, and in a day to 1,000 on weekdays. The numbers for weekends will be 500 an hour and 2,000 a day.
Spams have become a nuisance as hundreds of small wireless service providers keep sending advertising messages to subscribers that cover items from fake financial documents to weapons.
The short message ad market is huge, with domestic research firm iResearch saying the turnover is likely to reach RMB 724 million ($106 million) this year.
China Daily said that although the government decided to crack down on junk mail most of its efforts failed because it is difficult to differentiate spam senders from genuine messages.
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