This notice is in response to recent telecommunication industry events related to texting (SMS) services and how it is impacting RingRx customers.
THIS ISSUE IS AFFECTING ALL TELECOMMUNICATIONS PROVIDERS
For background on this issue, please review this article
Over a year ago, the major cell phone providers created a new requirement for businesses to send text messages to cell phone customers. The requirement is that in order for businesses to send text messages that originate from non-cellular phone numbers (e.g. a business phone number) would only be allowed to send messages to cellular numbers if the business registers their number and business (they call this a “Campaign”). The organization managing this is The Campaign Registry (“TCR”).
Firstly, this process is a major problem faced by all business telecommunications providers, not just RingRx.
The rollout of the TCR was nothing short of a complete disaster. The process for creating campaigns was full of bugs and delays. As a result of the campaign problems, the TCR did not enforce the requirement evenly, and barely at all. They discouraged telecommunications providers from creating campaigns unless their numbers were affected. RingRx followed their requirements with exact standards.
TCR implements their enforcement through three main clearing houses. Beginning the middle of the week beginning 9/18/2023 some initial reports of increasing enforcement were starting to occur. Telecommuncations carriers received no notice or warning. Within two days, enforcement was nearly complete with one of the three main clearing houses (Syniverse). However, the campaign registry proces of that clearing house was not functioning. As a result, RingRx was not able to create campaigns for customers experiencing issues. We worked with our carrier for several days to get them to improve the process so new registrations could be processed. While we were optimistic this would have been resolve last week, it has not been fully completed.
RingRx uses two main “carriers”. A carrier is a wholesale level phone company that manages calls between companies. One of our carriers uses one clearing house (Syniverse). Syniverse started enforcing the campaign requirements last week. Our other carrier did not start enforcing until this week. So the extent of the problems experienced by our customers was not consistent: Some were affected earlier and most did nto have any noticeable issues until September 28, 2023. At present, any customer who is using texting could be affected.
We highly regret the pain and inconvenience this is causing. We know the impact to you is serious. We are determined to get your service working again as quickly as possible and are working as quickly as possible to ensure the most seamless resolution. Unfortunately it requires some effort on your part. You likely have reported this to our support desk, which will respond to you expediently on what to do.
If not, please go to this form and complete it as soon as possible:
https://portal.ringrx.com/settings/campaign-registry
We will handle it from there. Please be advised, completing our form does not instantly make your texting start working as the TCR has to review your application. Once its approved, your texting should start working. Normally this happens fairly quickly, but with the massive amount of new phone numbers being registered over the next few days, we do not know if there will be delays or not