The PPP plan, announced on 16 July in London and likely to be in force as early as this Winter, seeks to make it much easier for subscribers to get out of mobile subscription services, for fewer, more targeted, unsolicited texts to be sent to consumers and to allow consumers to make informed purchase decisions.

The thinking behind the move is that, as consumers have voted with their feet and embraced mobile services in ever greater numbers, the number of complaints is also rising. Research carried out for the regulator has shown that 38 per cent of UK consumers have used a phone-paid service, 18 million people in total. More than 30 per cent of under 16's from low income households and 18 per cent of more affluent children have also used mobile phone-paid services - A boom for the mobile industry.

However, an extraordinary increase in complaints has accompanied this growth, says PPP. It received more than 8000 mobile related complaints in 2007/8, a 108 per cent increase on the previous year.

But is the recently announced plan to curb unwanted - and often charged for - marketing texts and to make it easier to get out of subscription services going to help?

Well, on the face of it, it won't affect MIG's business too greatly as these sorts of services have never been the company's core business. "As a business we've not focused on traditional PRS services which have been responsobile for so many of the issues, it is only a small part of what we do, which is mostly transactional based services," says Barry Houlihan, CEO and Founder of MIG. "We carry no unsolicited bulk SMS on our network. We also don't operate any third party databases', we operate our own billing databases and have developed our own internal compliance procedures - which include a yellow and red card policy of our own to ensure we constantly monitor our customers services."

However, where MIG leads in self regulation and runs a comprehensive self imposed code of practice, other companies in the space are not so open about what they do, and there are some who deliberately mislead consumers.

"For this reason I welcome the move, to some extent," says Houlihan. "However, the sheer volume of SMS sent in the UK every day means that it is impossible to check that every single message is compliant. It is going to be very hard to make this work so that every single message is compliant. Consumers will continue to complain - it won't happen overnight.

"Also, to meet the potential PPP's new rules will mean even more vigilance required by companies like MIG and that will cost and it is not a cost we can always pass on down the value chain to our cusrtomers" he adds.

That said, the rules do offer a better service and a more trustworthy market for consumers, so good businesses will adopt it, but once again, a lack of balance between business understanding and consumer protection seems to have won out.

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