Interconnect charges for SMS should be introduced into the South African market without increasing the current pricing structure for SMS messaging, says Pieter Streicher, MD of BulkSMS.com.
He notes that with these charges, consumers will be protected from spam originating from outside their home network.
“Whenever communication is available at a low cost for commercial purposes, there is a higher risk of abuse, as has been seen with e-mail. Cellphone users are even more vulnerable as it is much easier for scamsters to spam a sequential combination of numbers, rather than a combination of letters for an e-mail address.”
He says unscrupulous messaging service providers will find the necessary loopholes to send messages for free, making consumers vulnerable to spam and even scams.
“For example, all business messaging, known as application-to-person (A2P) messaging, to an individual's home network, could potentially be routed via several foreign networks,” says Streicher. “This could make it very difficult to trace the original sender and significantly lower the cost to the sender.”
Financial risk
He says without interconnect fees, South African network operators earn no revenue on the spam messages they have to deliver. Operators would also have the added financial strain that comes with the customer complaints they would receive. “In extreme cases, with international premium-rate scams, it could pose a serious financial risk for the home network, and these costs could then be passed on to the consumer.”
Local operators prevent this by not allowing cross-network A2P messaging. “While this solves the revenue challenge for operators to some extent, it still leaves loopholes wide open,” he adds. Businesses could bypass this by making their messaging appear to be person-to-person messaging by using GSM modems. This route is less reliable, and falls outside the normal network contractual requirements for messaging providers.
In addition, he says messaging providers are at risk due to the networks not allowing cross-network A2P messaging. Messaging providers receiving poor service from one operator are stuck with that operator, as each network has a monopoly on A2P traffic to its own subscribers.
The solution?
The UK serves as an example where interconnect fees between the networks solved the spam problem in 2003, he says. “The fees forced messaging services to use official channels.”
Interconnect fees will also enhance competition in the messaging industry. According to Streicher, introducing an appropriate SMS interconnect charge will go far in addressing the issues.
It will also allow for healthy competition and innovation in the messaging market, he notes.
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