China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has published a report on the service quality of the country's telecom service providers in the third quarter of the year.

The report shows that in the period, more than 13000 mobile terminals involved in illegally sending of group short messages were shut down. In addition, over 600 telecom value-added service providers were punished for illegal practices, and about 11000 basic telecom service providers were either closed or asked to rectify their SMS businesses.

Previously, MIIT issued a circular which stated that the total short messages sent via each mobile phone number during non-holiday days shall not be more than 1000 or else the SMS function of the mobile phone will be screened. However, with the coming of 3G, spam short messages and malware programs are now beginning to attack 3G mobile phones.

MIIT's statistics show that in the third quarter, a total of 10791 complaints were received, 30% of which were made about communication service quality, which was an increase of 3.7% compared with that of the previous quarter.