The Next Step in Business Messaging: What is A2P 10DLC?

Swapna Abhilash

March 19, 2021

Application-to-peer (A2P) SMS messaging has been increasing its prevalence as a go-to business communication tool in the United States, with businesses projected to spend USD 40 billion on A2P messaging by 2024. With this rise in traffic, carriers have been moving towards providing more avenues for A2P business messaging to flourish.

The most recent development in the US A2P messaging market has been the introduction of 10-Digit Long Code (10DLC), which allows A2P SMS traffic over long code phone numbers. 10DLC supports multi-brand messaging, has higher reliability, and is geared towards business messaging use cases such as alerts, notifications and marketing messages.

With more carriers moving their traffic towards 10DLC, here are some commonly asked questions to find out what it means for your business.

How does 10DLC improve my current long code A2P traffic?

The US long codes widely used by businesses in previous years were only ever designed for person-to-person (P2P) communications. They have low volume throughput and lack desirable security standards. Carriers have always considered them to be an unsanctioned A2P SMS route. For this reason, they were subject to blocking and throttling.

A2P 10DLC has been specially designed and sanctioned for business messaging. It offers upgraded stability, delivery reliability, and security to businesses and their audiences. It will also support the volume of messaging throughput that almost any business use case might require.

What are the requirements to use 10DLC?

In order to send out SMS traffic using the 10DLC route, businesses are first required to register their brands. Their campaigns then need to be approved as well. This will inform the regulatory bodies that the content has been vetted and approved for use by carriers.

Any content that is sent using the 10DLC route without proper registration will lead to blocks, suspensions, or even fines by the carriers.

At 8x8, we will support your business with the brand registration process and walk you through the steps involved.

What are the brand tiers and how does it affect my business?

Once a brand has been approved, carriers will place each brand in their own class or tier level based on their assessment of how trustworthy the brand is.

Class and Tier levels will have different throughput rates and even different surcharges. The higher the brand tier, the higher the throughput rates and lower the surcharge rates.

Repeated violations of spam or content policies can lead to lowering of the brand tier. This can drastically slow down the brand’s allowed throughput rates, as well as lead to more expensive surcharges.

What are variable throughputs?

Once the brand has been registered and approved, each campaign needs to be registered as well. The carriers will then allocate throughput instantly with the campaign ID and brand ID. These throughput rates are not fixed, and are determined by carriers based on the business and use case.

For example, notifications or transactional SMS may be assigned higher throughput rates (2FA and OTP), and marketing campaigns may be assigned lower throughput rates. This is assessed on a case-by-case basis and is up to the discretion of carriers.