Many people use their mobile phones to send SMSs to their contacts. Next to occasional SMSs to friends, family, and relatives, people may want to send large amounts of SMSs using their phone subscription to large amounts of contacts for business purposes. Doing so, they might receive a warning notification from their operator about excessive or abused usage of their SMS capability, with a risk of having all SMS traffic being blocked.
In this article, you will learn about fair SMS usage, typical phone subscription clauses, P2P and A2P SMS traffic, and possible solutions to lower the risk of seeing all your phone SMS traffic being blocked. We’ll also discover alternatives to legacy sim box solutions.
Contents
Unlimited SMSes and fair usage
As telecom operators often include unlimited SMS in mobile subscriptions, it is important to understand that this SMS usage is most often still capped by a principle of “fair usage.” As a customer, you have to understand any conditions related to the services you consume, referring to documents such as, for Proximus, the “Specific Terms and Conditions for the mobile phone Service” (see French and Flemish versions as well).
In this document, we effectively learn about the following restrictions:
Article 4.2 : In the context of unlimited offers, the following practices are not considered as normal or personal use (non-exhaustive list):
- When the Customer sends more than 10,000 SMS messages per month and/or 500 SMS messages per day.
- When the Customer sends SMS messages to more than 250 different recipients per month.
- When the Customer regularly makes calls for more than 6 hours per day and/or 30 hours per week.
- When the Customer uses more than 100 GB per month.
Article 4.3 : Proximus reserves the right to limit the supply of the Service or to suspend and/or terminate the Contract without compensation when the Customer’s use cannot be considered as normal or personal. Proof of the above prohibited practices may be provided by any means and by any legal means, including using data and records from Proximus systems or systems provided by third parties. The Customer and Proximus shall consider such data and records as authentic, until proven otherwise.
From “People to People” to “Application to People” messaging
As you understand from these 2 articles, the SMS capability included in your mobile subscription is meant to support “People to People” communications (P2P). Understand this as you sending a short message to your family members, friends or colleagues.
This traffic is not considered as regular P2P messaging anymore when it comes to letting all of your 400 or 2000 customers know at once that your business is open again or announcing new specific service hours. When it comes to enterprises communicating to their customers thru large SMS campaigns, the terminology “Application to People” messaging (A2P) is commonly used. As the names suggest, all outgoing SMSs are not sent anymore from your mobile phone but using an application that, somehow, interfaces with telco operator’s platforms to submit the SMS traffic. Applications can be:
- an online campaign management service, allowing to define communication campaigns (the message content, the schedule to have the message sent, the list of targets) and their associated channels (SMS, email, voice calls).
- your own application or business workflows, which will use a SMS API (Application Programming Interface) offered amongst others by telco operators to submit messages onto telco mobile networks
Contrary to P2P SMSes, A2P SMSes are mainly used in one direction, breaking the balance in incoming and outgoing connections between operators, who are still charging each other for delivering these messages on their network. That’s the main reason why operators offer P2P for free, while A2P comes at a cost.
What if I don’t want to switch from P2P to A2P
If you don’t want to transition from P2P to A2P messaging and want to solely use your mobile phone to send large amounts of SMSs to your business contacts, you know now about limitations and fair use imposed by telco operators. The only ways to keep sending SMSs from your phone are to:
- lower the number of SMSs you send per day
- ensure that each of your SMS messages consumes the least amout of SMS parts (avoiding special characters and staying under 160 characters)
SMS API? But I’m not a developer!
Proximus offers an SMS API via its Proximus API Solutions platform. With this capability, developers can easily allow their own applications or business processes to send SMSs to mobile phones.
You are not a developer but are looking for an off-the-shelf solution where you can upload contacts, messages, and schedule campaigns? Or are you looking for an interface where your employees can have simple SMS conversations with your customers? Contact us!