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Sunday, November 18, 2007

Telcos Implementing SMS Spam Control?

Its not official, but we have been monitoring the SMS delivery behaviour of the telcos and it seems that there is a constant 2 minute delay for receiving SMS.

The word out the streets is that Telcos have implemented a Spam Control system to weed out illegal use of unlimited SMS promos. Its not unknown to many that there are underground services that uses these promos to send free SMS accross telcos which is a feature not provided by default in these promos.

It is said that these underground services is the main cause why the Telcos has been losing revenue on the international SMS market.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

sir, with this "control" implemented by telcos, currently we are designing a mobile service that will take advantage of the SMS unlimited promo but because of this, we might be scrapping the project. What do you suggest that we take so that we will be accepted by the telcos as a legitimate business?
thank you.
seanrasty323@gmail.com

godie said...

Hi,

Right now the mobile service provider I work with have implemented a "normalizer" mechanism to counteract the Spam Control since it seems to affect even the legit services especially on promos that requires users to send as much SMS raffle entries as possible or the likes.

The spam control telcos have implemented seems simple that -- if a number send more than X numbers of SMS within 2.5 minutes that number will be blocked for sending SMS for the next 2 minutes. So far that X variable seems illusive to compute but we know the block/delay is 2.5 minutes.

On your case a modem farm wouldn't be much of a help either because you cannot designate a specific single number which would act as a gateway where the users could send the message. Rather than using unlimited SMS you can buy discounted loads from a load provider, surely at maximum 15% profit margin from the providers there is more than enough revenue for your project to prosper.

This doesn't however address the issue of the gateway, you can either lease a short code from a mobile service provider for the purpose of accepting incoming SMS which is not filtered by the Spam Control. This will require a bit of change in the way your service works and may even have a lower rate of ROI than what you have projected from your original business model.

So far the technique to counter act this Spam Control is considered top-secret and I have not heard from any other CPs how they manage the problem. AFAIK by the time I have posted the issue in my blog the company i consult with has tested their counter measures and it worked perfectly.

Finally i would advise revising your business models that uses unlimited SMS since it is not a sustainable factor.

Regards,
Godie

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