Minister of Information and Communications Nguyen Manh Hung has directed the Vietnam Telecommunications Authority (VNTA) and network operators to stop the supply of pre-activated SIM cards.
Hanoi (VNS/VNA) -Minister of Information and Communications Nguyen Manh Hung has directed the VietnamTelecommunications Authority (VNTA) andnetwork operators to stop the supply of pre-activated SIM cards.
A solution is needed to stop thesale of pre-activated SIM cards this month, he said at a meeting this week.
Pre-activated SIM cards arewidely available and users can buy them easily without having to register theirdetails.
Explaining the situation, NguyenDuc Trung, director of VNTA under the Ministry of Information andCommunications, said in taking the number of subscribers as a measure ofachievement and business results, telecom enterprises found ways to increasethis number.
Earlier, five mobile networksincluding Viettel, VNPT, MobiFone, Vietnamobile and Gtel signed a commitment toblock spam messages in May 2016, applied from July 1, 2017.
The heads of the operators willbe responsible to the Minister of Information and Communications for theimplementation of this commitment.
The Ministry of Information andCommunications said that under its direction, operators had implemented manymeasures to prevent spam messages.
Nearly 20 million pre-activatedSIMs were retrieved and blocked. Although these solutions had contributed to asignificant reduction in spam messages, the problem persisted.
One reason given was that therehad been no agreement on the criteria for identifying spam messages. Thesystems and measures used to block spam messages were not consistent and therewas no inter-network mechanism for blocking and filtering messages.
The Ministry of Information andCommunications said that it would announce criteria to assess the effectivenessof blocking spam messages.
These criteria would be based onthe data reported by customers about spam messages and the technical systems ofnetwork operators.
This would be considered animportant indicator to assess the quality of mobile services of networkoperators later and would be published on the websites of the networks so thatpeople can monitor the results of the measures.-VNS/VNA
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Illustrative image (Source: internet)
