Fry Up: Fear and loathing in telco regulation land

12.02.2011

I wake in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, my heart pounding. I can't see it, or hear it, but I can sense it is out there. Lurking. Restless. Ready to pounce.

Text spam - or in its more odious form - txt spm.

A new plague that could, if we are not very careful, infect every mobile device in the country. It feeds on 'bill and keep'. That is, when carriers charge nothing -- zip, zero, nada -- for text messages that are terminated on their networks.

You might think that bill and keep would be nirvana for end users, who have often queried why, if text costs nothing to send over a network, do the carriers charge for it? Why do they lock their customers into on-net deals, so that if they send a text to a friend whose mobile providers isn't the same as theirs, they can pay as much as 20c. Which really adds up for the folk under 25 years old, for whom text is a crucial form of communication.

But Vodafone and TUANZ warn that we are in danger of being deluged by text spam if the Commerce Commission doesn't allow carriers to charge each other a token amount for routing texts.