Maxis Leads to Promote Good Industry Practices with Content Providers

Monday, June 5th, 2007, Maxis Press Release Installing Steps to Curb Unsolicited Content, SMS Scams and Spam Activities for Consumers' Protection

Maxis Communications Berhad ("Maxis") today formed a strategic partnership with selected External Content Providers ("ECP"), as part of its effort to promote and accelerate the development of good quality services and content, and the acceptance of such content.

This partnership is the first initiative led by a mobile service provider in Malaysia to help key content developers to strengthen their own range of products and services geared towards fulfilling customers' needs and demand, while at the same time serve to protect consumers' interest by encouraging and sharing of best practices among content providers.

The partnership was formalised over a signing between Maxis and 18 of its selected ECPs including Ahead Mobile, Arthatek Resources, Dapat Vista, Didadee, Dubaitech Marketing, Ecentury, FunMobile, Gen-X Technology, Isentric, KotaEmas Edaran, Macro Kiosk, Matrix Internet & Wireless, MNC Wireless, Mobile Touchetek, Nexnation Network, N-Visio, Yo Mobile and Zed Mobile Malaysia.

The Elite Partners were selected based on their good record of promoting high quality or unique content services, strong customer services and consistent track record on delivering value.

Through the partnership, these Elite Partners are provided with priority account support, facility access and technology expertise by Maxis to develop and implement services that meet and exceed customers' increasing demands for new innovative services.

"While the mobile content market continues to expand at a rapid rate, we want to ensure that the industry is shaped to benefit the content providers and the consumers equally, and that we work towards enabling and delivering rich media and content services that consumers want," said Maxis' Head of Products and New Businesses Dr. Nikolai Dobberstein.

"Through this partnership, we want to encourage and cultivate a high standard code of practices and compliance by all industry content providers, also curbing spam activities that affect mobile phone users and giving them the best user experience," he added.

There are currently no less than 300 content providers in the industry and errant content providers are suspended by Maxis if they are found responsible for pushing unsolicited content and charging on content without the consent of customers.

Maxis reported that a fair number of its customers are also affected by SMS scams received from abroad, especially Indonesia. To this end, Maxis has invested approximately RM3.5 million putting in place an anti-spamming solution which will be able to verify the authenticity of the sender SMS from overseas before allowing them to reach its customers, blocking SMS spam with more security features such as key word blocking and anti-flooding detection. With the anti-spamming solution, Maxis expects to lower spam activities by 80%, diminishing the amount of SMS scams from reaching its customer base of 8.5 million.

"While we do what we can to protect the consumers, we also urge our customers to be wary of any SMS scams and contests promising handsome cash rewards which seem too good to be true, especially if they require you to send in money as processing fees for the prize money that do not exist.

"If our customers have doubts about the legitimacy of the SMS contests, they can call up the Maxis Customer Help Line at (03) 7492 2123 to verify. If they know the origin of these scam messages, they should report it to us or the police," Dobberstein highlighted.