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SMS delivery to China is delayed / never completes

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Update (as of February 2022): even with the changes below, our SMS vendors cannot guarantee SMS delivery due to China SMS restrictions, see below
 
Twilio is currently unable to ensure that messages sent to mainland China are reliably delivered because of restrictions around content, encoding, signatures, and use case. These restrictions have resulted in the blocking of seemingly legitimate and registered customer traffic. Due to this, Twilio is currently unable to support China message registration and messages sent through Twilio would be delivered on a best-effort basis with limited support only.
 
Nexmo: https://help.nexmo.com/hc/en-us/articles/204017393-China-SMS-Features-and-Restrictions

Note: Due to a change in policy on the operator side, Vonage API no longer accepts registration of OTP and notification messages that include a URL link

 

SightCall is looking into alternatives, in the meantime we recommend sending links via email or some other messaging system.

 

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China is one of the largest and fastest growing mobile markets in the world and it is also one of the most difficult countries to reach as many filters are in place to block messages in and out of the country.  Sending SMS to Chinese mobile numbers may be subjected to manual review to screen for prohibited content and messages with certain new keywords may be blocked / filtered without warning, which can delay delivery of messages for up to 24 hours in some cases.

To avoid such problem, we recommend you to configure your Use Case SMS Notification setting to use the following configuration:

  • From = (Leave the "Custom Alphanumeric" checkbox unticked)

    mceclip0.png

  • Body = (copy / paste this template below)
    Click the link below to start a video session
    请点击下面的链接以开始视频会议
    ${url}

The above template has been validated and approved by our SMS provider.  This template must be strictly followed to have better success chance of sending SMS to China.  

This template should be set up within your Use Case Configuration > Notifications setup.

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