Choosing an A2P SMS Supplier

Choosing a wholesale A2P supplier is a procurement decision that gets made on a rate sheet and regretted in production. The questions below are the ones that separate suppliers who will still be working for you in a year from the ones you will be replacing in three months.

Ask them before the contract, in writing, and keep the answers. Half their value is having something to point at later.

Commercial

• Which route does this rate correspond to? If the supplier carries several routes per destination, the quote should name one. A rate without a route type is incomplete.
• Is billing per message part or per submission? And are failed submissions billed? Model both against your own traffic before comparing quotes.
• How much notice do I get on a rate change? Anything under a week means your cost base is not forecastable.
• What are the payment terms and is there a deposit? Prepay is normal in wholesale. Understand what happens to an unused balance if you leave.
• Is there a volume commitment, and what happens if I miss it?

Technical

• SMPP, HTTP API, or both? If you will run SMPP in production, confirm the test is on SMPP too.
• What submit rate is my bind provisioned for, and what happens when I exceed it? Clean throttling with a defined error is workable. Silent dropping is not.
• How many binds can I open, and is there a separate receiver bind for delivery receipts?
• Are delivery receipts relayed from the operator or generated by your platform? This is the single most revealing technical question on the list. Note exactly how it is answered.
• Is Unicode supported end to end on this route? Ask specifically, per destination. Support in the platform does not guarantee survival on the route.
• What is the failover behaviour? If the primary route for a destination fails, does traffic move automatically, to what, and are you told?

Compliance

• Who handles sender ID registration in markets that require it? Get the division of labour and the lead time in writing.
• What is your policy on prohibited content categories? Every legitimate supplier has one. A supplier who says anything goes is describing their other customers, and you will be sharing routes with them.
• What data do you retain about message content, and for how long? Relevant to your own obligations to your customers.
• Are you licensed or registered where the destination requires it? In several markets this is now a matter of public record, and it is worth checking rather than accepting.

Operational

• What is the escalation path outside business hours, and whose business hours? A supplier ten time zones from your peak is a different proposition.
• How will I be told about planned maintenance and route changes?
• Can I see per-destination delivery reporting, or only account totals? Aggregate numbers hide a failing operator inside a healthy-looking country.
• Who is my technical contact and are they a person or a queue?

The answers that should worry you

Some responses tell you more than the content of the answer:

Evasion on route type. “All our routes are high quality” is not an answer to “is this direct”. Suppliers who are direct say so immediately, because it is what they are selling.

Delivery guarantees. Nobody controls the destination operator’s filtering. A supplier promising a specific delivery percentage is either describing something they cannot control or defining delivery as something other than arrival on a handset.

Pricing far below the operator floor. Discussed in more detail in our piece on how wholesale pricing is built, but the short version: unusually cheap termination is a routing decision, not a commercial achievement.

Reluctance to fund a test. A supplier confident in a route will let you measure it.

Support that is excellent until the contract is signed. Raise a real ticket during your trial specifically to see what happens.

Do not buy on a single supplier

For any destination that matters to your business, having a second tested supplier is not redundancy theatre. Routes degrade, operators change filtering rules, and suppliers lose interconnects. The cost of qualifying a second supplier while nothing is wrong is small. The cost of qualifying one during an outage, with your customers waiting, is not.

Next steps: how to test a route, how to read a rate sheet, or put these questions to us directly.