I'm building an SMS infrastructure for transactional messages and I'm really curious about the challenges others have faced. I've noticed failure rates as high as 15-20% in certain areas, which I didn't expect. Issues like carrier filtering, grey routes, and compliance seem to complicate things significantly. I'm interested in which SMS providers you're using, whether you've dealt with similar delivery issues, and how you approach debugging when messages fail to arrive. I'm genuinely looking to understand these challenges better, not promoting anything.
2 Answers
You'd think someone building SMS services would have a handle on this, right? But seriously, it can be a bit of a mess no matter your setup. Just gathering others' experiences can be helpful!
We use Twilio for our services in the US and UK, and it works fine. But when it comes to Southeast Asia and India, it's a different story. Those 15-20% failure rates match up with our experience too. We’ve had to create a fallback system with three providers: Twilio -> SNS -> local carrier, along with delivery receipts and retries for failures. Debugging can get tricky since Twilio will say 'delivered', but nothing actually reaches the phone. What regions are you focusing on?
I'm dealing with over 70 countries right now. I’ve even avoided China because the failure rates are just insane.
Yeah, asking for insights is totally valid. Not everything is straightforward, especially with SMS!