Is Bandwidth killing your 10DLC Bandwidth?

Is Bandwidth (or other legacy carriers) strangling your SMS throughput? 😰

If so, you’re not alone! Legacy Communication Platform as a Service (CPaaS) providers like Twilio, Telenex, Vonage, and yes, Bandwidth, often arbitrarily throttle your business SMS traffic 😡. In this post, we’ll dive into why they do this and how you can ensure you get the throughput you pay for and deserve! 💪

Want to watch the video that inspired this post? You can do so Here!

🚫 Why Legacy Carriers Throttle Your Traffic

While Bandwidth is mentioned specifically, this isn’t just about them. Most legacy CPaaS carriers operate similarly. When we talk about throughput, we mean the amount of messages you can send per minute and per day.

Standard 10 DLC Throughput: What You Should Get 💡

On a standard 10 DLC A2P campaign, you should be able to send:

• 240 SMS segments/minute with AT&T 🚀
• 150 MMS messages/minute with AT&T 📸
• 2,000 segments/day with T-Mobile 🗓️

This can increase significantly with higher vetting:

• Up to 4,500 SMS segments/minute with AT&T! 🤯
• Up to 2,400 MMS messages/minute with AT&T!
• Up to 200,000 daily segments with T-Mobile! 🎉

Each of your registered campaigns should have this specific throughput. So, if you have 10 standard campaigns, you should be able to send 10x those numbers across all campaigns combined (e.g., 2,400 SMS segments/minute with AT&T).

The Throttling Game: How They Limit You 🛑

However, messaging providers like Twilio, Bandwidth, Vonage, and Telenex will arbitrarily limit how many messages you can send per minute. How? They restrict the number of API calls you can make in a given time, often 10 seconds.

For example, a common limit is one API call per second, which means you can only send 60 messages per minute. 🐢

Compare that to the 240 messages/minute you should get with AT&T, and you’re leaving a lot of volume on the table! 📉

Why Do They Do This? 🤔

1. Carrier Limits: They want to keep you below the carrier limits to avoid dropped messages (which you might still be charged for!). But 60 messages is way below 240!
2. Infrastructure Costs: The real reason? They don’t want their systems to scale up, because that costs them money. 💸 If a thousand customers, each with 10 campaigns, all decide to send traffic at once (that’s 10,000 campaigns!), it would crush their infrastructure if not throttled. Many frankly don’t even have the infrastructure to handle it.
3. The “Queue” Lie: You’ll often hear them say your messages are “in the queue” and will progress soon. The question you need to ask is: “Am I exceeding a carrier rate limit, or your internal rate limit?“ Press them on it! 🗣️

If you’re a larger platform, like a CRM or marketing platform reselling traffic, this is a nightmare! Every single customer gets bundled into that same API rate limit. This means:

• Messages show as queued on your platform. ⏳
• If “speed to lead” is crucial for your customers, these legacy carriers will kill their speed because they prioritize avoiding infrastructure costs over your business needs.

✨ The Signal House Difference: Throughput You Deserve!

At Signal House, we engineered our infrastructure to scale efficiently. This means:

• If 10,000 campaigns need to send traffic all at once, we will not rate limit you! We scale our infrastructure to handle it. 📈
• The only rate limits we have are carrier rate limits.
  • If AT&T limits you to 240 SMS segments/minute, we limit you to exactly that on the AT&T channel. No arbitrary cuts.
  • If you have 2,000 daily segments for T-Mobile and want to send them all in five minutes for a critical marketing blast, you can do that with Signal House! 💨

This holds true as you scale even further. If you’re a platform with 20 customers, each sending 4,500 segments/minute with AT&T, we will not limit your account! You’ll send everything you need, precisely per the campaign’s carrier limits. We only rate limit based on the carrier’s limitations for that specific campaign.

Signal House vs. Legacy Carriers: A Quick Breakdown