Telus is no longer providing a service allowing customers to download pornographic images onto their cellphones.
After receiving hundreds of customer complaints, the Vancouver-based telecommunications company decided to suspend the adult content service, said Telus spokesperson Jim Johannsson.
"An important part of developing any new product or service is reflecting on customer feedback in a genuine way, and we've taken to heart some of the concerns that a number of our customers have expressed," Johannsson told CTV.ca in an interview.
Several thousand customers had signed up for the age-verified adult service since it became available in January. Vancouver-based Telus became the first Canadian wireless provider to allow its customers to download pornographic images for $3 each, or video files for $4 each.
Telus stressed that while nude images were offered, there was no graphic sex.
The phone company used several distributors who provided adult content under "strict definition and standards" that comply with the Canadian Wireless Standards Association.
It defined three categories of sexual content: tier one portrays full or partial nudity; tier two shows simulated sex acts and close-ups of genitals; tier three shows actual sex acts.
Johansson said Telus offered only tier one content.
"It wouldn't even be considered soft core," he said. "The content would probably be no more graphic than what you'd see on typical TV on any broadcast television station."
But shareholders, business groups and religious leaders have been voicing their complaints about the service since it became available.
Archbishop Raymond Roussin, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Vancouver, said earlier this month that the service took the ''accessibility of pornographic material further into the public realm.''
"Given the increasing awareness about the problem of sexual addiction to pornography through Internet access, and the abuse that this perpetuates of vulnerable persons, Telus's decision is disappointing and disturbing," Roussin told the B.C. Catholic newspaper.
Telus has not spoken directly to Roussin, but Johannsson pointed out that adult content has been available on cellphones equipped with web browsers for the past several years.
"In fact, one of the things we've learned from customer feedback in the past few weeks is that a lot of customers were actually not aware that the Internet had arrived on their cell phones," he said.
"The cell phones that people are carrying today aren't the same devices that people were carrying four years ago. Our estimates suggest 90 per cent of cell phones in use in Canada today are web capable. So if the user has access through their service provider to the Internet, they've got all of the wonderful benefits of that -- but also all the risks to manage as well.
