China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has published a report on the service quality of the country's telecom service providers in the third quarter of the year.
The report shows that in the period, more than 13,000 terminals involving in illegally sending of group short messages were shut down. In addition, over 600 telecom value-added service providers were punished for illegal practices and about 11,000 basic telecom service providers were either closed or asked to rectify their SMS business.
Previously, MIIT had issued a circular which said that the total number of short messages sent via each mobile phone number during non-holiday days should not be more than 1,000 or the SMS function of the mobile phone would be screened-out. However, with the coming of 3G, spam short messages and malware programs are now beginning to attack 3G mobile phones.
MIIT's statistics show that in the third quarter, a total of 10,791 complaints were received, 30% of which were concerned with communications service and this was an increase of 3.7% compared with that of the previous quarter.
