Verizon Throttling SMS messages

[GrandWizard]

As many of our Verizon customers are already aware, yesterday Verizon started throttling their email-to-SMS service to something like 10 messages per minute. When you have ~40K customers with Verizon accounts that isn't very much so alerts are delayed by many hours.

AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon use a service called Cloudfilter to block SMS spam but it looks like Verizon's version of the filter has been made to stop pretty much all traffic.

Unless someone knows someone at Verzion who can stop this, we have no work-around other than to recommend that you use the PUSH notifcations in the Eyezon app instead.

[GrandWizard]

As of 9AM EST today it seems they have relaxed their limits and our messages are going at a rate closer to normal. There is obviously some throttling still going on but we are keeping up with normal weekday messaging load.

[GrandWizard]

We still receive complaints about Verizon throttling messages. Somedays they don't, somedays they do.

If you have any pull with someone above a level 1 tech at Verizon, please let them know what they are doing.

[GrandWizard]

One of our customers managed to get a hold of an senior tech support technician with Verizon and they admitted they installed a text message filter about 2 months ago and it is affecting all of their customers.

[GrandWizard]

Here is a potential work-around for Verizon throttling.

1) Create a dummy Gmail account
2) Forward all traffic to that email address to your Verizon phone using the format XXXXXXXXXX@vtext.com. To forward on Gmail go to Settings->Forwarding and POP/IMAP
3) Create a new Eyezon contact for the Gmail account you created. Enable that contact on your portal and select which type of alerts you want.

While they still might throttle some of your alerts, the odds are much lower due to the sheer number of SMTP servers that Gmail uses.

[hokie21]

I spoke to Verizon tier 2 support about this problem a few minutes ago. Skippy76 had the correct answer in the Rogers SMS Issues thread. Verizon throttles messages on the email to SMS gateway. There is no option on the Verizon end to not throttle messages from a certain service provider. As Skippy76 said:

The correct way of doing it is to get a short code or long code and send SMS messages through an aggregator such as OpenMarket or Twilio. You may event consider taking a look at ZipWhip. You can reuse the EyezOn support phone number to originate the SMS messages from.

Has Eyezon looked at using an enterprise SMS gateway solution rather than relying on email to SMS? This solution should fix your problem for both Rogers, Verizon and any other cellular carriers.

[GrandWizard]

Yes we have but as I said on that thread we couldn't offer a free service and use an enterprise SMS solution as all are pay-per-message.

We are considering offering an a direct SMS solution for our Envisalerts+ customers but even then the number of messages would have to be capped at something like 50 per month.

[GrandWizard]

Oh, and this is funny, my colleague just pointed out that Twillio and ZipWhip announced they are going out of business.