Apprently it wasnt enough that telcos were competing with ordinary Joes for the bulk SMS market now they have decided to ruin it completely for everyone.
Very soon all promotional text messages will be stopped from getting to you and YOU. Until you opt in, by default you don’t get to receive promotional text anymore from bussinesses.
This has been in play for quite sometime now, during the NCC tussle with MTN, the latter was blocked from serving promotional text via her network from 8 PM to 8 AM. Now they’ve made it official - well almost, as they are slowly rolling it out.
I don’t think the NCC reached this conclusion on their own without help, and I can imagine what the likes of MTN will gain from this move. I think the recent lucrative revenue growth from A2P (app to person) messages is driving this;
From 1.4 trillion A2P messages sent in 2014, an expected rise to 2 trillion and worldwide generation of $71.4 billion in 2019. A2P is bringing back the sweets on SMS Bottomline and the telcos are looking to tap in. And guess who gains the most from the telco pool locally?
So while MTN is allowed to disturb me, DominosPizza may have to pay now to be able to notify her customers of their new promo run.
My brother just makeshift stuffs for now. Bulk SMS businesses are now shipping palliatives that users have to get their subscribers to opt out of the DND pool before they can receive messages, which would be fine if we’re talking about a family group. Its crippled patronage for them. Not even funny!
To make it worse is that presently the telcos haven’t started offering ways to get off the list - even if paid for - besides advising businesses on how to get their subscribers to opt out of the list. Which leaves me wondering how a business with thousands of subscribers can do that if they’ve already been cut off from the one means they could reach them?
VAS providers are running small fever right now, as a result.
It’s not just MTN, though. I noticed it a few days ago, and reached out to all of them for comment. Airtel is the only telco who lets users opt out of ALL SMS messages. The rest of them just used the NCC to throw their VAS partners under the bus. Tragic.
From a consumer perspective, I say good job!. It’s annoying when you can’t unsubscribe from such messages. Sometimes, you didn’t even subscribe in the first place.
I happen to run an SMS site. The main issue now is that DND is automatically activated on some MTN lines. These subscribers (most of whom have never heard of DND) never activated it themselves and have been shut out of BULK messages without their consent. The funniest part is that if they make attempts to unsubscribe by sending ALLOW to 2442,MTN replies saying they are not subscribed to DND.
So the way around it now is that, the affected lines have to ACTIVATE then DEACTIVATE DND to start receiving Bulk messages.
Yes. People that spam us will understand. It’s very annoying for a consumer. I have so many of these useless text messages on my phone. I am even afraid to drop my number at these stores or online websites anymore.
e.g.
BABA OSOGBO
Text “Orunmila” to 1211 to get a discount on your next sacrifice and get the intestine of a female bearded goat for free.
Baba Osogbo will continuously send me unsolicited sacrifice messages without my consent. I can’t even unsubscribe. Not even a helpline to Ifa to report his spamming ass.
One of the casualties of war.
As a businessman, you should be seeking alternative solutions. You can’t go against the will of the people. The people want this. Hell, I can bet that even you will be happy to stop receiving constant unsolicited messages on your phone.
If you put up a post seeking for alternatives/solutions I will be willing to contribute. We, the people, welcome this new development.
I know it isn’t just MTN, this is an NCC directive. But It actually started on the MTN pool and was very much expedited from there. Not minding that months ago they were one of the biggest players in the bulk SMS business, eating away at the margins of the little guy.
@ukay none of the telcos agreed to this for your own wellbeing, its simply a play for another fast growing sms market. The likes of Whatsapp, Viber, Twitter …etc - that serve 10’s of millions of notification or verification alerts via SMS every day will now have to subscribe to the Disturb list to get to you. Of course they won’t have to do this personally, the companies that deliver their messages (likes of twilio, infopib…etc) will now have to dole out for all her subscribers and offload the cost later on the businesses.
@lord_commander now you won’t be able to get that last minute alert from school about postponement of exams, or from your church about the next holy ghost rave.
I think they should have let people unsubscribe from whole list on their own. That’s more conscientious and better fair play.
my final year project in school was a royalty based telecoms project. I sent it to MTN, glo, airtel and Etisalat at the time. I called it Consumers Royalty Enterprise and it is the foundation on which I founded Coremobile. The idea was to force unsolicited senders of messages to pay a royalty fee Eg. Every time a user receives any advertising SMS, he receives NGN4 (or whatever the SMS rate) credited to his phone for the inconvenience.
And then let everybody set their incoming call rates independently.
Eg. I might want to receive NGN10 for unsolicited messages while someone else might want NGN500.
So every user of a mobile phone should be able to manage their phone number by setting their own call and SMS rate, and have a portal for listing their connections(phone number of family and friends) who will pay the baseline rate. And then anybody not on that list will pay their CORE rate.
Turns out the biggest problem was building the technology and it’s hard to build on a final year project when you get a multinational engagement immediately after tossing your hat.
The Telcos don’t have a flexible charging technology and any technology that does not fit into their current infrastructure capability is a hard sell.
I think DND would be best managed by a system like this.
I have true messenger installed and I get a clean inbox 99% of the time. With this development the telcos will be making a killing upon the notion they are doing me a service.
@uduak this is still very much worth giving a shot. Limitations however are reliably in the hands of the telcos, but for the system deployment I believe I can bring in the guns, talking statues with execs isn’t my forte. Cutting red tapes bore me to smithereen.
Ah, baba u want VAS people to run out of business.
From a customers perspective, this is a dream come true.
From Telcos/VAS Firms, this is a huge problem that has to be managed.
VAS Firms apply to NCC to get licenses and approval paying millions for same license, then pay to Telcos and now hv to wait for months to get on the line to pitch their products then kiss ass to get product accepted, then wait another 1 month for UAT and Integration test before they get some Database and still hv to sort those database and target spending millions to have intelligent platforms, they now have to sign partnerships with content providers and musicians sometimes buying the rights for RBTs flat out with millions so in their operation to get to the point of launch has been uber capital intensive.
VAS firms use Bulk SMS, Short code ( 34588 etc) ,RBTs( Ring Back Tones), USSD ( *888#) and Voice calls to market product and services and debit daily from N 10 to N 100/Daily,weekly or monthly depending on the service, the previous regulation was no unsolicited Messages from 8pm to 8am, but VAS firms had been finding ways around this and exploiting it, some erroneously and wickedly dont provide opt out codes which is wrong, they use targeted messages to target regions mostly upnorth where they can get quick returns as that region and some East and SS states provide quick opt-ins as Expected Lagos has the lowest adoption rate because im sure many just delete the messages the moment they get them., with NCC new regulation, all customers are put on a DND list previously known as Blacklist by the Telcos so you must market and allow people Opt-in to your service than spam meaning the Telcos will be stringent in onboarding new services to their platforms, seeing as the revenue formula is 70:30 or 60:40 in some places the Telcos too arent smiling, its their cash cow getting axed. The 737 USSD Banking service is one service that has shown that VAS can be Useful so this allows VAS Companies go back to the drawing board and think of useful services.
PS: I co-ran a VAS Firm that had Etisalat and MTN as Partners, things are about to get quite heavy in the sector.
