China's Ministry of Information Industry (MII) is strengthening control over telecom value-added services with MobNIC, an affiliate of China Mobile Communications Association, to soon publish a new unified short message special service number beginning with "106".

Meanwhile, telecom departments are working on a new plan to re-allocate service provider codes used for SMS.

According to the MII's requirement, all short message service numbers must begin with "106" in the future although the number of digits following "106" has not been determined.

This means users of China Mobile, China Unicom, China Telecom and China Netcom will use the same short message service number in the future.

MII is currently collecting feedback on short message number callbacks. It is expected that China's first regulation concerning short message will come out within two months.