29 May 2005

Reducing the Nuisance caused by Unsolicited Promotional Calls

Recently, the community has been very concerned about the nuisance caused to consumers by unsolicited promotional calls. The nuisance has been particularly infuriating if the call recipients are mobile customers who happen to be overseas and connected to the roaming service when the calls come.

Unfortunately, such calls are not banned by existing legislation, unless the degree of nuisance reached the threshold of a criminal offence, but this is unlikely.

The Government intends to legislate to ban unsolicited electronic messages. This legislation needs careful drafting so as not to interfere with legitimate business activities. We are now consulting the business and IT sectors on the principles to be incorporated and hope to introduce a bill into the Legislative Council as soon as possible.

General opinion seems to support the prohibition of promotional calls generated from recording equipment under the future legislation against unsolicited electronic messages. However, it may not be necessary to restrict the promotional calls originated by human beings. Making calls by live persons is necessary for many legitimate business activities. For example, banks and property agents need to contact their potential clients through telephones. Moreover, the cost of initiating calls by human beings is relatively high and therefore the quantity and extent of nuisance of these calls are not comparable to calls automatically generated by equipment. The future legislation should not over-regulate otherwise there would be undesirable side-effects. The public are mainly concerned about unsolicited promotional calls automatically generated indiscriminately by audio recording equipment.

As a law enforcement agency, OFTA's action is constrained by what can be done under the existing law. Before the new legislation becomes effective, within the bounds of the existing law, OFTA will urge the industry to take measures to reduce the nuisance caused by unsolicited promotional calls as far as possible.

Most of the calls received by mobile customers are originated from the customers of a small number of fixed network operators. Why do these fixed network operators welcome these customers, particularly when the customers send calls to the mobile customers? That is because under the existing interconnection arrangement, for every call between a fixed network and a mobile network, the mobile network operator pays an interconnection charge to the fixed network operator. In other words, the more calls are made from a fixed network to a mobile network, the more revenue will be received by the fixed network operator. From the point of view of the fixed network operators, the additional source of revenue must be welcomed. However, the fixed network operators may be disregarding public interest by tolerating or encouraging their customers to cause a nuisance to the community. OFTA is in discussion with the fixed network operators involved, reminding them of their social responsibilities in conducting their business.

If the mobile network operators consider that these calls from the fixed networks harm their quality of service to customers and cause a large number of complaints, they should seriously consider whether the commercial interconnection agreements with the fixed network operators contain terms which do not allow such calls to be delivered over the interconnection and take actions accordingly. When two networks interconnect, each party should have a responsibility of not sending through the interconnection messages that could harm the network operation of the other.

M H Au