How to deal with mobile spam the Chinese way - severe restrictions for all!

You’ve got to love this. Apparently Chinese mobile networks are so horrifyingly clogged with spam texts that the government has been spurred to action. In order to combat this, the number of texts that any mobile can send will be restricted. What kind of effect will this have on those responsible for the spamming? Probably not much.

So, from now on any given mobile number will not be allowed to issue more than 200 texts per hour, or 1,000 texts per day during the week. On weekends and holidays, that amount goes up to 500 per hour and 2,000 per day.

This measure has been agreed on by the three main mobile networks in the country, China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom.

Source Reuters

What we think?

But I just don’t see how it will have that huge an effect. Let’s look at two other systems. In Vietnam, all advertising SMS must be tagged as such. Anyone who’s sent one is notified beforehand that an incoming SMS may be spam, and they have an option to just not receive it. In India, all advertising SMS are tagged and tracked - so that if anyone makes a complaint about receiving spam by text, the guilty party can be fined accordingly.

Both of these systems share an “SMS tagging” system that allow spam to be dealt with properly, rather than just squashed. I know China has network compliance issues, so that different architectures might not be able to read tags properly on inter-network SMS. But surely there’s a better way to handle this than across-the-board restrictions.

And lastly - how difficult will it be for an ad-spam company to set up a rack of phones to send a specified number of SMS per hour? This may be an initial hindrance to spammers, but I doubt it will stop anything.