Since January we’ve been re-designing a number of areas of our architecture, notably Simwood Mobile’s SMSC. Our Mauritius development team weren’t satisfied with any of the solutions available to them and, true to form, thought it might be a challenge to write their own from scratch, including full character-set conversion. They had a lovely time and the result is awesome! Anybody tried texting in Japanese with emojis lately from a Simwood Mobile?
Separately, our core SMS capability in the API hasn’t evolved much in recent years. Some of you may know we started in 1996 as ‘eSMS’, the world’s first global gateway between the Internet and mobile phones and so SMS has always been close to our heart. However, it is far from core in revenue terms, but the market is changing. With that in mind we’ve done a couple of other things;
SMS sent through our API now leverages Simwood Mobile’s new SMSC. Crucially, this of course includes our MNO connections. Your SMS flows directly into one of our partner MNOs for rapid high priority delivery with full delivery reports. This is very different to a PHP form dumping traffic on an aggregator with questionable delivery rates, as some people consider acceptable (however differently they may describe it!).
We’re reviewing our commercials to bring SMS in-line with voice and our new packages, whilst passing on the savings made by eliminating aggregators. Therefore, effective September 1st our SMS rates will change as follows:
SERVICE LEVEL
UK SMS (GBP)
REST of WORLD SMS (GBP)
Production accounts:
Start-up
Virtual Interconnect
4.5p
2p
6p
Managed Interconnect
POA
Non-production use:
Developer
4.5p
10p
6p
10p
As you see that is a 55% reduction for production accounts and we’d remind you it comes with no specific SMS commitment – just use SMS through our API against your existing prepay balance. SMS does, of course, count towards any account-level spend commitment, just like voice minutes.
USD and EUR accounts will be billed at a rate derived from this one that adjusts for foreign exchange movements in-line with our voice rates – our Operations Desk can confirm it.
Finally, as per our AUP, we have a strict no-spam policy and will be monitoring accounts for unusual activity. As we cannot jeopardise our MNO relationships, any accounts with message activity that is problematic will be handed off to an aggregator without notice; that is where they specialise. For the record, P2P traffic is obviously ok, A2P traffic such as one-time-passwords (OTP) are also acceptable as are most legitimate A2P applications.