The USA is an incredibly hostile market at the moment as you might have picked up from some of our blogs. SMS is one battleground and, frankly, one battle we’ve decided not to get involved in. We don’t ‘send’ US SMS at the moment and while we have the full capability to enable customers to register campaigns as now required by 10DLC, the risk reward just wasn’t there for us to give it any attention. That remains our position – the capability and economics are there but an opportunity needs to make it worth the risk.
One unexpected casualty of the changes has been incoming SMS. 10DLC was intended to regulate A2P SMS, not P2A and certainly not P2P, but it has. A number of other operators have introduced policies which require a campaign to be registered before a number can receive SMS. We think this is dumb and counterproductive at so many levels.
We’ve been doing some work around this and are pleased to resist this stupid policy – Simwood US numbers can receive SMS without having to register for an outbound campaign. Of course, responding or transmitting is not receiving and would require registration but for the vast majority of use cases our customers just need to receive.
Of course, we cannot implement the policy on third party networks, e.g. if somebody with a clipboard decides they’re not going to transmit to a number which doesn’t have a campaign registered, but we don’t see much evidence of that. We’ll keep it under review.
