please make these be known
It’s very searchable but even more this is all publicly available via both the FCC’s and the Federal Registry’s websites/archives. I’m not going to provide individual links to all the orders and announcements.
Well… Blaze…
I was thinking you could save the SIP providers allot of time and money if you had first hand knowledge of “5 years of rulings, orders, and guidelines” which would be helpful for the SIP providers to justify defying state and federal laws and blocking traffic.
Ohh well. The SIP providers will need to pay to have their own research done.
You might say, Dave, why don’t you do the research? I have… I’ve done the research to find laws that speak to what the SIP providers are doing is illegal.
Its the SIP providers job to be able to justify what they are doing is legal.
What do you hope to gain by this?
They always do. Doesn’t matter what the new regulation or law is be it federal, state or local. The responsibility falls on the provider to make sure they are in compliance of said law or regulation. They do their own research with in-house or other legal counsel.
The end goal is to stop SIP providers from blocking traffic.
Or at least substantially narrow the scope of blocked traffic to fit within as, Blaze says, “5 years of rulings, orders and guidelines”.
I hypothesize the blocking is being done generally and not specifically.
Again you are ill informed here. The SIP providers are not the ones blocking the messages. You fail to listen and understand how messaging from a SIP provider makes it into the cellular IMS system. There are only 2 gateways into the Mobile Network Operators.
Those gateway providers are the ones who block the unregistered traffic. It’s not the SIP carriers. Go take your argument with those 2 SMS gateway providers that the Mobile Network Operators have forced all of us to use.
Even a large CLEC like Bandwidth.com who is 700 million in yearly revenue is forced to send all their SMS to those 2 providers. Please start targeting Syniverse and Infobip along with the wireless providers who won’t allow any traffic that is not registered.
Infobip, Syniverse and Tata ? did the FCC give them that control ? IANAL but don’t we have any anti-trust/monopoly laws anymore ?
Well as goes everything with the feds FAAFO report back your results. It is easy to claim the win untested and uncontested. Be the one who test
I would love for there to be more options here. But the wireless operators get to pick who can send them messages. We all want a solution here that isn’t the current broken process but someone has to take on the big 3 mobile operators who control access to their customers for SMS. The issue is the FCC hasn’t accepted that the system is broken.
Maybe I’m old and stupid but I had to google FAAFO but it didn’t help my comprehension .
Regarding @bduehn difficulty in getting 10DLC messaging campaign up and running. I’ve done this twice now with ClearlyIP and it was rather easy. The ClearlyIP staff was more than helpful in not only guiding through the process but also “checking the work” and making correction suggestions prior to submitting to make sure there was the highest probability of success on the first shot.
The toughest part was getting the client to get their end settled (provide example text, get their website updated with privacy, opt-in/out statements etc) in a timely fashion. Once that was all done ClearlyIP took care of everything and made the process easy.
Waiting on approvals was a PITA and definitely some room for improvement there but that’s out of the sip providers hands.
@BlazeStudios Looking back I didn’t explain myself properly… the FCC has no “jurisdiction” or maybe better “Capability” to provide the mechanisms for the actual regulating “on the ground”… They can make the rules but don’t have a method of direct enforcement so to speak. Therefor they pushed it to the mobile carriers to “figure it out…” Kind of in the same way that the federal transportation commission sets the national speed limit but doesn’t give out speeding tickets.
They actually do since they could do it for Short Codes, etc in the past. The general public can report SPAM/fraud text messages directly to the FCC and the FCC can investigate and issues fines to the violators.
Carriers used to not be allowed to block any calls, now we have that ability under certain conditions. Carriers used to not be allowed to block any texts, now we have that ability under certain conditions.
A lot has changed in the last five years around all of this. So what the policies were in 2019 are not the same in 2025. There’s quite a few things we have now that we didn’t in 2019 and it’s going to keep changing. Don’t forget, in 2019 you could be a Flowroute (or other) reseller that directly billed your customers for voice/sms services and you weren’t a VoIP Provider under the FCC. Doing that today, you are 100% a VoIP Provider under the FCC.
100% @BlazeStudios… The disruption to the industry is nuts.
This was introduced in 2021 and by 2023 numerous providers stopped the enabling of messaging on accounts until 10DLC was completed. There were entire periods during this time that businesses could have done registration with no fees, the vetting process was easier and carriers didn’t even charge the per message surcharges. Much like STIR/SHAKEN and 911, there have been numerous deadlines and push backs of those deadlines so everyone had a chance to complete the requirements before full enforcement went into affect. During all of this, the sending and accepting of messages from unregistered numbers was accepted. I posted back in December that on Feb. 1st 2025 the mobile carriers were finally dropping the hammer and no longer accepting messages from unregistered numbers.
The industry was disrupted in 2021, just like it was with the new 911 requirements and laws. Just like it was with the TRACED Act, Truth in CallerID rules and STIR/SHAKEN. I mean the latter was enough to have a bunch of small SIP providers close their doors. I’d view that as more disruptive than “Oh I dragged my feet for 4 years and now I can’t send messages until I do X”.
I have spent the last 5 years, along with @tonyclewis, making posts in this community about the changes being imposted by the FCC or new federal laws. Those post mostly went ignored or had replies from people saying it didn’t concern or impact them. Of course, down the road the same people were finding out that yes it did concern and impact them.
It’s been 4-5 years of announcements and notices for all these various things. If people have ignored the FCC announcements, the announcements from their providers/carriers or even in their own communities about all these new regulations, laws and/or rules. That is on them.
I’m not used to seeing it with 2 “A’s” in the middle… it’s usually “FAFO”.
I realize that this is an opinion/prediction, and you could very well be correct. But my experience is that companies make policy, and lawyers craft arguments to try and make the policies appear to be legal. In my last 36 years of working in the private sector, never once have I ever seen a company decide against doing something simply because the lawyers said it wasn’t a good idea.
It is not.
Unfortunately, this has nothing to do with private business SMS. Further, although a court might stretch this to apply to the blocking of official government text messaging, the context of the statute is about a person intentionally vandalizing the telephone infrastructure in the U.S., thereby blocking the government from conducting legitimate business or communicating vital information protecting the country’s security and safety of the public.
Since Congress passed additional legislation ordering telecommunications companies to combat and reduce SPAM, the likelihood that a court would stretch the language in any prior legislation to contradict the intent of the SPAM legislation is next to none.
Thanks for the research you did, but I just don’t think it is applicable in this case.
Yes, and thank you both @BlazeStudios & @tonyclewis. There is a plethora of legislation that I would never have known about if I never read it here in this forum, and this has caused me to reconsider joining some peer groups just to see if it’s just me or are there many others in the telecommunications business that are out of the loop regarding new regulatory controls.