Overview

Following years of lacking regulation around the use of 10 DLC (normal phone numbers) in the automated messaging context, the US carriers have come together and decided to implement a new regulation called A2P 10 DLC. It stands for Application to Person 10 Digit Long Codes.

The regulation has been designed to allow A2P messages, by implementing a new requirement for businesses to register their brands & campaigns beforehand, in order to limit spam and other abuses. As a counterpart, carriers agreed to raise the throughput for those messages to levels more appropriate for business uses, according to the level of trust assigned to the business sending the messages.

The SMS protocol defines a character limit after which a message must be sent as multiple message segments; a message under this character limit is sent as a single segment. The 10 DLC throughput rates are based on the number of message segments sent.

10 DLC throughput rates are allocated based on:

• Destination Carrier
  • Most campaigns will send messages to multiple carriers, and so the throughputs and limitations are the combined total across the carriers
  • Throughputs applied to ported numbers are throughputs applied by the current carrier assigned to that number, not the original carrier
• Vetting Score - Customers are advised to go through a vetting process in most cases, to ensure the best throughputs are applied to their brands, as well as allowing them access to special campaign use cases.
  • Determined by external partners of The Campaign Registry (TCR)*
  • A vetting score from 0-100 is assigned to the brand
  • Higher scores provide access to higher throughput and message limits

* The Campaign Registry is a third party company entrusted by US carriers to manage the registrations of brands & campaigns in order to be "10 DLC compliant."

• Campaign Use Case - The type of message being sent (ie. customer support, marketing etc.)
  • All messages sent to end users must be sent by a number linked to a 10DLC campaign, in line with the correct use case for that message
  • Each campaign type has its own throughput and message limits per carrier
  • Some campaign types have their throughput measured for each sender registered within the campaign; others are based on the sum of messages sent by all senders registered within that campaign (most use-cases)

AT&T and T-mobile have announced starting to apply pass-through fees (PFT), as well as throughput speeds and potential message filtering for unregistered traffic from the 1st of March 2022. We encourage all our customers to transition to either 10DLC compliant routes, or to divert their traffic to accepted alternative numbers (Dedicated short-codes or Toll-Free numbers).

All traffic that is not compliant after the 1st of March 2022 may be blocked by the carriers, or be charged a higher PFT, as well as being delivered at a lowered throughput.

AT&T and Verizon Wireless

AT&T applies 10 DLC limits based on the campaign type, and throughput is measured per-minute. To simplify the number of 10 DLC limits that our customers must take into account Vonage are applying the same limits to Verizon.

• TPM - Text (segments) per minute
• TPS - Text (segments) per second

* AT&T Considered Campaigns for Marketing or Mixed use cases to be of class B, D or F; while other use cases are considered A, C or E.

**Russell 3000 companies are automatically assigned Message Class A/B

*** Pre-approval from Vonage required

T-Mobile and Sprint

T-Mobile and Sprint allocate throughput based on brand trust score. Rate limits are applied per brand, per day. Rate limits reset the next calendar day at 12:00 UTC.

*Applies to brands who apply for a special business review or certain political and government agencies. External vetting is a pre-requisite.

All Other Carriers

Vonage has configured the rate limits for all other carriers to 600 TPM, per sender.

API Response Status (Error Codes)

Note: The throughput is based on the campaign level for AT&T, and on the brand level for T-mobile.