The definition of SPAM can be generalized as any message where the recipient's personal identity is irrelevant because the message is equally applicable to many other potential recipients and if the recipient has not verifiably granted explicit permission for the message to be sent. "Especially therefore it is such an enormous dread for subscribers. Many people use SMS as it is cost-effective and quick, but the greatest strength of SMS is that it is a closed and personal way to communicate", Van Ouwerkerk continues.

Traditionally, the problem of SPAM has been most prevalent in fixed networks. However, for mobile spamming, one needs to have access to the mobile network, which has always been restricted to names, accounts and not free of charge. This, said van Ouwerkerk, is a natural barrier to sending unlimited amounts of SPAM text messages. Unfortunately spammers are capable of sending ‘spoof' messages (unsolicited SMS with the sender's identity masked). With such messages spammers pretend to be sending the message in someone else's names for free to anyone in the world. "This brings the risk that soon, SMS will suffer as much from spam as emails do today."

Irritant is growing

Statistics around the world confirm the rapid proliferation of mobile spamming: in Japan, NTT DoCoMO reports that over 80 percent of SMS traffic is unsolicited in nature. In Europe, reports show that 63 percent of mobile phone users, have received unsolicited SMS messages. As spam messaging is growing, it constitutes a potential irritant to receiving parties. In particular, SPAM messages detract from the benefits of SMS by bombarding customers with irrelevant messages that caused important message to be lost or forgotten. SPAM also has the potential to create an effective denial of  service condition by filling up the SIM card's memory. Besides that SPAM presents an especially damaging experience to the subscriber when a deceiving message dupes them into calling a premium rate service. For the network operators the major risk is a commercial one. Irrespective of the actual source of the SMS SPAM, the blame for SPAM and its related impacts are typically accrued to the home network operator.

Be prepared for the future

"Because the financial and subscriber satisfaction impact of this problem is expected to be, combating SPAM in SMS traffic is the key challenge of tomorrow",  pretends van Ouwerkerk. "First of all it is the operator who has to do it, but we support them to combat this growing problem. The operator has to have the proper anti-spam and anti-spoofing equipment installed, such as a SMS firewall that can be configured to allow only legitimate messages to be passed to the end-user. Thereby, our SMS firewall can also be configured to detect different spoofing techniques and it is prepared to adopt to new techniques." Van Ouwerkerk continues: "Providing more network control to operators and preventing SMS spam is quickly becoming a key differentiator for mobile messaging providers," said van Ouwerkerk. Within that framework I can say that we're ‘future proof'.