At the NCC Day Forum in November this year, Dr Eugene Juwah, executive vice chairman of the Commission, said that “there will be sanctions for content providers and networks that breach the guidelines that we are developing on the issue of VAS provision and unsolicited SMS”.
The Commission in Nigeria claims to be aware of the challenges when it comes to quality of service and unsolicited or spam SMS.
“The regulator is developing guidelines for the operations of those that are called content providers; people that provide content and push it to telecoms consumers,” Juwah said. “We also recently held a meeting with VAS operators, where the issue of spam text messaging was discussed exhaustively.”
Nigeria is not the only country affected by unsolicited SMS. It is a global battle and Juwah said that because the internet is not regulated, a lot of spam text messages emanate from other countries – in the same way you might get spam emails from the public internet in your email inbox.
“But for those emanating from the networks, we are working on minimising it,” he said.
