Voice and SMS have become the chicken of the operator

These days the carrier Big Brother China Mobile has again been pushed to the forefront: in order to achieve more users to use the 4G flow set of KPIs, some local mobile companies and the old WAP free flow package users broke out of the conflict, which was highly concerned by CCTV and said that 315 party will focus on the matter. Such things should be flattering to China Mobile, and it should be a successful solution to the "soft landing". I think the root cause of this thing is still now operators anxious, in micro-letter and other OTT business expansion of the background is desperately turning to the era of traffic management.

Voice and SMS have become the chicken of the operator

China Mobile in the three major operators in the market share of more than 62%, so more representative. 2011-2013 China Mobile SMS revenue fell year by year, by 0.9%, 2.8% and 6.5% respectively. Revenue from China Mobile's voice business in 2013 fell 3.4% year-on-year. 2014 years ago in three, China Mobile voice and short MMS business fell, the total number of minutes compared to a year earlier down 0.3%, text messaging usage is down 20.2% from a year earlier. With the decline of China Mobile short message revenue, micro-letter in the years of rapid rise, from 0 to 600 million users, China Mobile President Li also said: "The reason for the decline, micro-letter directly played a major role, Ott seriously affected the traditional business income, the operation brought great pressure."

The sharp contrast with the decline in voice and SMS revenues is that the flow business is becoming a new cash cow for operators, bringing a sign of a "golden decade". 2014 years ago, in three quarters, China's mobile data service has increased 98%,4G users have reached 90 million, and traffic revenue has replaced voice short color as the mainstream. The voice message of the data service is one after the other, let the voice message become the chicken of the operator.

Who's killing voice and text messages? Not just micro-letters.

I'm afraid it's not just the influence of micro-letters, micro-letter phone book, a letter of network telephony to experience better, the use of lower costs, but we also have to note that the operator's voice and SMS experience worse, in addition to the quality of the call itself has not been stable outside the past (base station investment to 4G, data business tilt, the other), A more serious problem is harassing the phone.

Spam messages and harassment calls are rampant. Some people say that SMS inbox is becoming a verification code inbox, my inbox is "Verification code inbox + Junk SMS Distribution Center." At the urging of public opinion and regulatory authorities, operators began to seriously manage the spam message, the situation is getting better. In contrast, the problem of harassing telephones is getting worse.

The average number of calls I receive every day is "020" harassing phone calls, financial, intermediary, on behalf of the invoice, fraud abound, there are some mobile phone numbers. This is not my personal case, Sogou number issued a report shows that the total number of harassment calls in 2014, up to 27 billion, of which, the fourth quarter of the total number of harassment calls 9.26 billion, the year-on-year increase of 1.9 times times, the first 10-month average growth rate of 19.9%, The number of harassing calls in October reached a peak of 3.73 billion, and the mobile footprint of the harassing phone was rising. This reaction to the harassment of the phone growth rate is huge, the number of astonishing, has become a spam message after another cancer, think about more than 100 million of the phone call every day is harassing phone calls, is a bad thing.

Harassing the phone is not only affecting the user's life and tranquility, infringing the privacy of users, the more serious problem is that many of them are to make money fraud phone, such as ringing, winning, express packages and so on. The increasing number of harassing calls will only reduce the user's dependence on the voice, and I am starting to get more and more out of the phone and not use the phone when I can, instead of using a micro-letter, micro-mail phone. Although there is already a number of Sogou phone number management assistant to prevent harassment, but in the software to change the help, harassment phone is still impossible to guard against.

As Li, China Mobile's president, has played a major role in the decline of voice and text messages, the underlying reasons cannot be ignored: Spam messages and harassing phones have dramatically reduced the user experience, and the core advantage of Internet products is the user experience. The question is, why don't operators manage harassing phones like spam messages?

Manage harassing phone, reduce traffic income, keep technical short board

Although operators have started harassing phone management procedures, but so many years of harassment phone repeated and has become more and more serious, the reason is more complicated.

First, spam messages once accounted for more than 20% of the overall text message, which meant that spam messages had brought significant revenue to operators. Similarly, the harassment of the telephone will also bring a certain amount of traffic, every day, hundreds of millions of harassment calls also generate considerable income, and harassment telephone number of the purpose of the account is basically to harass, if the Yiguoduan will affect the income, operators are currently not motivated to seriously administer harassment calls.

Second, harassing calls are harder to define than spam messages. Spam message has a pair of large mass and other significant features, to judge the rules of spam message is clearer; but many of the harassment phone is intermediary companies, insurance companies, financial institutions such as "marketing phone", it is difficult to define is not "harassment." In

Decision of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress on strengthening the protection of network information

Laws and regulations such as the Letter ordinance, a harassing call is a vague definition of the consent or request of the holder of a telephone (including a fixed telephone, mobile phone or other mobile communication terminal, etc.), or the explicit refusal of the telephone holder to send commercial electronic information or other illegal and criminal information to the caller.

Again, harassment of telephone monitoring and interception of the technical threshold is higher. Spam message is based on text, feature is the point to many mass, so it can be completely through the text content analysis, Mass action feature analysis to monitor and filter. But harassment calls are all dependent on tactics, and the content is that sound is difficult to automatically monitor the analysis through technical means, so the technical threshold of harassing telephone control is higher. Now harassment calls only rely on the "public packet harassment phone tag" mode, such as Sogou number pass, but it is difficult to intercept all harassment.

Finally, the harassment phone itself is constantly upgrading technology. For example, Sogou numbers, such as app use crowdsourcing mode labeled harassment phone number, intelligent interception, but the harassment phone can be changed by software to bypass this interception, and harassment phone defense application fight guerrilla warfare. The defense of the change number software requires the operator to upgrade the network technology, internet companies can do nothing.

For operators, managing harassment calls is a pressing

Harassment is "killing" the operator's core "voice" business, which makes users more and more lack of trust in voice. If the operator is fully moving to the traffic business, it doesn't matter whether or not the voice can do well. But there is quite a bit of time before the full flow of traffic, and voice will contribute a lot of revenue. More importantly, operators as state-owned enterprises need to have a high sense of responsibility to protect the user's privacy and property security. Operators can do better in the following areas:

1, strengthen the number management ability:?? Control the number from the source 、?? To be able to manage the number and traceability is the root of the harassment phone, such as real-name means, the qualification of the depositary, the agents of the strict control measures, in the number source on the phone.

2, improve the harassment of telephone monitoring technology:?? Dialing behavioral features by phone 、?? Regional characteristics of key monitoring, can even use speech recognition technology to analyze the content of the call, from a mass of traffic behavior to find the harassment, in the access to the phone. There is the change of software, so that the failure of the software can significantly reduce the number of harassment calls, a significant reduction in fraud success rate.

3, the provision of harassment telephone complaints channels:?? Similar to the Internet app's "complaint" mechanism,?? Adopt crowdsourcing mode to clean up the voice call environment. That is, operators can be in the website, micro-mail, telephone customer service to provide complaints channels, like the current spam message channels, a number of complaints have been many operators to review, the number. This allowed the harassing phone to drown in the sea of mass warfare.

4, with the Internet Enterprise Depth collaboration: Sogou number pass, millet Yellow pages, such as number management app has harassing telephone interception function, accumulated a large number of data, including geographical features, harassment phone number library and so on, they do something operators should do, operators need to bow down with the Internet players to cooperate, Form linkage together to block harassment calls.

5, speed up the integration of communication technology: operators are now talking about "converged communications", which offer similar applications to the Internet, such as China Mobile's new "Three new phones", the main "new calls, new contacts and new messages", which are equivalent to the Internet of voice, messages and contacts. This way in the harassment of telephone interception can be based on the cloud Address book, you can call when the user provides a "one-click complaints" "One-button" button, which can eliminate the source of harassment calls.

The substitution of SMS for Internet applications is an irreversible trend. But voice service operators can still support for a long time, micro-mail phone, such as free voice applications in the quality of the call and so can not be comparable to, difficult to quickly replace. But the harassment phone is becoming the operator's voice business, if the operator can not solve the problem of harassing telephone, voice prospects worry. Of course, only relying on operator efforts is not enough, the law and regulations to prevent harassment, improve the awareness of users to prevent fraud, Internet harassment technology and product innovation, need to advance together.