SMS blocked for texting too many group messages
- Source: Global Times
- [05:10 January 04 2010]
- Comments
By Zou Le
Mobile phone users sending text messages to large groups of people at one time may lose their SMS (short message service) for up to 24 hours; a policy intended to prevent spam but took ordinary users by surprise when they sent group messages over the New Year holiday.
Shanghai-based Xinmin Evening News reported the policy Sunday after the paper's hotline received complaints from readers whose mobile text message service became dysfunctional after sending group messages.
A China Mobile user surnamed Liu told the paper that he sent a "Happy New Year" message to 60 people over the holiday, and discovered his SMS was blocked afterwards.
The customer service center told him that the service has been blocked due to "too frequent message sending" and that restoration of service would take up to 24 hours.
According to the customer centers of three major telecom operators in China, a computerized monitoring system has been installed to reduce commercial spam messages.
"The system scans the users' text message record randomly. Mobile numbers with an unusually large number of messages sent within a short period of time will be blacklisted and the SMS function is terminated thereafter," China Mobile's customer center told the Global Times Sunday.
The center did not give a specific limit on the number of people receiving the group message, saying that the standard varies and usually it is less strict on holidays. The center said the system is unable to differentiate the message contents. Many greeting messages are mistaken for spam.
The restriction on text messages is not stated in the contract between the operators and mobile phone users.
Yang Ling, a lawyer specializing in contract law at Beijing Yingke Firm, told the Global Times that mobile operators have a duty to notify customers of such a policy and specify the restrictions on group messages.
"Otherwise it's a violation of the initial contract in which the operator agrees to provide customer with a stable messaging platform. Customers in this case have the right to sue and claim compensation."
Statistics kept by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology show that more than 17 billion greetings were sent by text message during the Lunar New Year in 2009.
Zhu Xiaojing, a China Mobile user in Beijing, told the Global Times that she sent a group message to more than 200 people at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve, and then had to call the operator to restore service after her SMS was suspended.
"I wanted my friends and clients to receive my greetings at that special moment. I wish the operator had informed me of such a policy," Zhu said.
