Submitted by Mike Grenville on Fri, 20 Feb 2004 15:20

Empower Interactive have published a study they have conducted with 60 operators and 250 users and claim that a "Growing tide of mobile SPAM threatens to engulf mobile community if left unchecked."

The Empower study found that 65% of mobile owners already receive up to five SPAM messages per week, But is the problem really as big as it is being made out to be?

However another study by Silicon.com in June 2003 found that while 69 per cent of respondents have received spam on their mobile phone, the volumes are not high.

Our own 160 Characters straw poll (still in progress) indicates that the amount of spam is well below these figures, 46% of respondents either not having ever received any SMS spam or none within the last month. Click here to take survey

We all know and hate the mountains of viagra offers etc with email but this is just not happening with SMS primarily because unlike email SMS costs the sender. To put the volume of SMS spam in the UK in context, Mike Short, Chairman of the Mobile Data Association pointed out that sms spam only accounts for 0.001% of the total messages. But even at low volumes there is no doubt that spam on your mobile is irritating

Richard Shearer, CEO at Empower Interactive, calls for rapid action claiming that “The industry is aware that mobile SPAM is growing at an alarming rate. Unless they act now, the potentially negative impact on their brand, together with the additional Customer Service overhead created by SPAM, may consume these incremental revenue streams very quickly.”

However UK mobile operators have been taking the issues seriously and implementing a variety of measures, namely:

1. meaures to stop spam arriving from overseas
2. signifgicantly reducing spam originating from UK based aggregators
3. taking meaningful action

Richard Sullivan, External Affairs Manager at Premium Rate regulator ICSTIS credited the mobile operators for taking action against spam. The said that the issue is the way that some fixed line operators provide premium rate phone numbers to questionable suppliers and Sullivan urged them to "be more careful how they assign the numbers".

Speaking for the MDA, Mike Short said that "The solutions will never fill all the holes in the dyke but removing the financial incentives has already cut the majority of mobile spam. Going forward, mobile operators will draw lessons from the Internet world which has struggled to stop the spam mountain". In conclusion he stated that he "does not believe that SMS spam will reach the proportions as on the internet."

Most operators realise that Spam is an issue and they need to do somthing. Many operators SMS systems are coming to the end of their life cycle that is clearly a good time to implement solutions that enable them to manage all sorts of SMS traffic including spam.

So let's keep the issue in perspective and not stir up the consumer press into scare mongering.

Download the Empower report here

www.eigroup.com

ICSTIS