Why Are There Carrier Compliance Fees on My Usage Bill? Follow

Why Are There Carrier Compliance Fees on My Usage Bill?

You see carrier compliance fees on your usage bill and are wondering why. As of October 1st, 2022, each phone carrier charges compliance fees to the businesses that send text messages. These fees are unavoidable and are assessed based on volume, and customers of every software product that sends text messages are subject to these fees.  

These laws and the fees associated with compliance became part of mandatory compliance that requires every business that sends SMS/MMS messages to be registered, or they will cease to be able to send messages on any platform as of November 3rd, 2022. This mandate was originally published to the legal CRM support forum on July 21st, 2021.

As more and more businesses text their customers, the telecom industry has adopted regulations to protect wireless customers from unwanted text messages. As we strive to communicate well with customers, spammy or unwelcome text messages hurt us. Resulting from a surge in unwelcome text messages, new legislation, “A2P 10DLC” was passed to protect consumers.

A2P 10DLC refers to a legal compliance-driven system in the United States that allows businesses to send Application-to-Person (A2P) type messaging via standard 10-digit long code (10DLC) phone numbers. This system is specific to long-code messaging toward the United States and does not affect shortcodes.

What Do I Need to do to Comply?

Effective November 4th, 2022, unregistered businesses can no longer send text messages. There are two steps to being registered to comply with A2P 10DLC via The Campaign Registry:

• Step 1: Complete the Business Registration Form
• Step 2: Register Your Brand (Select the Brand Based on Your Texting Volume, the # of Message Segments/Month)

What is The Campaign Registry?

The Campaign Registry was created following legislation to regulate the telecommunication industries, including SMS services. The laws were meant to regulate robocalls, spam texts, and to make opt-outs for messaging an industry standard. The Federal Communication Commission (FCC) followed suit by instituting new rules, aiming to make SMS messaging more secure and trustworthy. To do this, a new entity was created to manage the use of 10-digit-long-code, also called 10DLC, phone numbers for application-to-person, or A2P, messages, including bulk text messages.

Ultimately, this will benefit both those on the receiving end and those sending messages and hopefully reduce the amount of SPAM in telecoms. The Mobile Network Operators, called MNOs, joined to create this more secure and trustworthy communication to form The Campaign Registry. The MNOs are carriers, like AT&T or T-Mobile, the networks where messages are sent and by who they’re delivered. We’ll refer to them as carriers throughout this piece to make it easier to understand. Just know that a carrier might also be called an MNO.

This registry will record who is using those networks and what they’re using them for. By joining, the carriers hope to consolidate their users into the singular registry to help enact better compliance with those laws and new rules passed in 2019 and 2020.

Thus, regardless of which CRM, PM, VOIP, PBX, or other communication platform uses text messaging or MMS, every organization must register by November 3rd, 2022, to send messages. Business registration is shared across every software platform.

Before this legislation, a company could have continuously kept changing phone numbers or jumped from one software or telephony provider to another and avoided these measures, but that will no longer be the case as that compliance and registration is now per business, not per phone number, and not per software vendor.

What Pricing and Compliance Fees Are Associated with the A2P 10DLC service?

There are mandatory compliance fees associated with initial registration as well as ongoing maintenance of the registration. In addition, there are per-message fees levied by the carriers. All these fees vary by carrier and may vary depending on the type of messages being sent and can change.

There are fees associated with initial registration as well as ongoing maintenance of the registration. In addition, there are per-message fees levied by the carriers. All these fees vary by carrier and may vary depending on the type of messages being sent and are subject to change at any time by each phone carrier.

Just so you know, any compliance-related fees are based on customer volume and recipient phone carrier-based fees and will be passed through to customers and listed in the monthly usage summary.

Example of compliance billing on a usage bill:
(Note: For illustration purposes only, as it is subject to change by each carrier at any time)

What is Required for Brand Registration, and What Recent Changes Do I Need to Be Aware Of?

Effective immediately, the telecom providers and phone carriers will deprecate the ability to register new Starter Brands due to updated registration requirements from The Campaign Registry (TCR).

Customers should no longer submit new Starter Brand registrations. The new Low Volume Standard Brand will be available September 28, 2022and should be used if you have a Tax ID (EIN) and low traffic requirement (less than 6,000 messages per day). Low Volume Standard Brands can be used for mixed messaging campaigns with multiple use cases, multiple numbers per campaign, higher throughput, and lower filtering than current Starter Brands. Low Volume Standard Brand registration will be available for $4. Campaign registration fees that used to be $50/campaign setup will be waived. (Note that Standard Brand and campaign registrations were previously available for $94). Low Volume Mixed use case campaigns have a monthly fee.

Existing Starter Brands must meet the new guidelines by November 3, 2022.

• Existing Starter Brands must re-register as the new “Low Volume Brand” by November 3rd, 2022.
• Subaccounts that are lower volume that send less than 6,000 message segments per month will be the new "Low Volume Brand."
• ANY subaccounts that send more than 6,000 message segments per month do not qualify as the new "Low Volume Brand" and must be registered for more volume-oriented brands.

Additionally, Starter Brands aren’t allowed to send political traffic. Register with Campaign Verify using the Political Use Case to send political content, and then register your Standard Brand. Existing Starter Brands that don’t meet these new guidelines are subject to removal by the telecom provider after November 3, 2022.