What SIM card real-name registration means for SMS providers

In this article: ► Legitimate SMS providers versus the rest ► Putting an end to flattering fake numbers ► How users benefit from SIM card real-name registration

In June 2021 the Hong Kong government passed the Telecommunications (Registration of SIM Cards) Regulation, implementing real-name registration for SIM cards. It took effect in September 2021, principally to prevent and help detect crime involving prepaid SIM cards — telephone fraud, online fraud, drug trafficking, people smuggling — and so to protect the integrity of telecommunications services and the security of the network.

So what does it mean for SMS providers, or for the merchants sending?

For legitimate SMS providers there is essentially no impact — if anything it is positive, pulling the whole industry back onto the right path of sending quality messages. Why?

“Legitimate” here means connecting directly to the telco to send, which is called a direct route. Because these routes come from the telco itself, they support Sender ID as standard. The illegitimate alternative sends through SIM cards, and those have no Sender ID at all. From that you can see why SMS without a Sender ID is so cheap — sometimes effectively free. It also produces a quality problem: the “successful sent” report such a provider gives you is not an official report and carries no credibility whatsoever. It is a dishonest practice.

Without a route that connects through the telco, there is simply no official response confirming the message was sent

Put that way, it becomes clear: some providers use machines loaded with many SIM cards to send, and how many went out and whether they succeeded may both come back to you as a flattering fabrication.

In fact, from late 2020 the telcos had already begun shutting down improper SIM-based sending, which is why you may have noticed some major operators reducing the monthly free allowance for on-network SMS. So with fewer anonymous prepaid cards in circulation, the tricky and cheating practices in the industry genuinely do decrease, and the focus shifts to doing a better job for customers.

The end users of SMS are merchants — retailers, marketing agencies, mobile apps, e-commerce and banks, across a wide range of uses — and all of them benefit, because they are no longer kept in the dark about messages that did not or could not go out. Every message matters to a merchant’s members, and real-name registration genuinely reduces dishonest sending and spam, so communication between a business and its members no longer goes missing.