Bottom Line: A rule affecting robo-texting (which is done without a phone) was mistaken for a rule governing/punishing users of T-Mobile phones. T-Mobile has not applied any new fines to customers for their SMS content.
Update 2023 December 31 11:58PM EST
Since I’ve made this posts, there’s been a number of other statements and posts about this misunderstanding that I think are worth considering. The Associated Press published an article about this misunderstanding/misinformation
“The change only impacts third-party messaging vendors that send commercial mass messaging campaigns for other businesses,” the company wrote in a statement emailed to The Associated Press.
Associated Press
There is now a community note under the account of one of the people that accounts for many views of this item of misinformation on Twitter/X.
…Bandwidth the company the user is referring does not provide consumer service. These specific terms of service are for commercial/enterprise users of the T-Mobile network. This does not directly apply to P2P (Peer to peer) messaging.
Twitter/X Community note
There was also a post in the T-Mobile Community forums by a user that received a response from a T-Mobile Community Manager.
These changes only apply to third-party messaging vendors that send commercial mass messaging campaigns for other businesses. The vendors will be fined if the content they are sending does not meet the standards in our code of conduct, which is in place to protect consumers from illegal or illicit content and aligns to federal and state laws.
HeavenM, T-Mobile Community Manager
Original Post
I watched misunderstanding get legs and spread pretty far during the Christmas holiday weekend. The gist of the misinformation is that T-Mobile is going to fine customers hundreds or thousands of dollars for sending text messages of which T-Mobile doesn’t improved. This misunderstanding appears to be derived from a reading of a Business Code of Conduct, but without an understanding of the terms involved or the partnerships between various companies. I’ll try to explain both in a moment.
Consumer and Non-Consumer Messages
If you have a T-Mobile phone and are sending text messages, those are consumer text messages. If you start a marketing campaign to send out mass SMS messages, create a 2FA service that sends out messages, or are using some other API access, those are non-consumer messages. A basic understanding of how consumer messages works is common, but not so for non-consumer messages. Let’s dig into that a bit more.
Non-Consumer messages are often sent through an API. These messages are sometimes labeled as A2P messages, which means “Application to Person.” The origin of these messages is not a phone. T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon provide the ability to post messages into their infrastructure for delivery. How do you get access to this functionality? Generally, you don’t. They don’t let everyone have access to these services. Instead, there are a number of companies with which they establish agreements and have granted access. If you want to use these services, you would establish a connection with one of these companies and they manage many of the other details of what needs to occur. Here are some names of companies that provide such services.
- Amazon Web Services
- Bandwidth
- BulkSMS
- Call Hub
- EZTexting
- Hey Market
- MessageBird
- Phone.com
- SalesMSG
- Textr
- Vonage
- Wire2Air
- Zixflow
There are a lot of other companies. You can find a larger list here. T-Mobile also has a document explaining the difference between consumer and non-consumer messaging.
As far as a consumer knows the messages are coming from a 10 digit phone number. These phone numbers may be referred to as A2P 10DLC (Application to Person 10 Digit Long Code). When a new messaging campaign is started, the number associated with the campaign must be registered. The number being registered and associated with an entity, brand, or campaign. Unlike short code messages, if a business also needs to allow customers to call them, they have the option of setting up a voice line associated with the same phone number.
The entities and phone numbers may also be assigned a trust rating. Entities that have a higher trust rating may be granted more throughput on a carrier’s network. If an entity’s trust rating become low, their granted capacity might be lowered or their messages may be disallowed all together. Entities earn a reputation.
What Are These Rules Restricting?
In a nutshell, the rules published by T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon disallow text messaging campaigns for unlawful material, including material that may be lawful in some states but not others, scam messages, spam, phishing attempts and impersonation. Some carriers may specifically call out other types of material, but the same general characterization of restrictions apply. The following is what was posted by Bandwidth about the notice (Update 2024 January 2: Bandwidth.com has since restricted viewing the notice. A screenshot of the notice can be viewed here).
T-Mobile is instituting three new fees for non-compliant A2P traffic sent by non-consumers that result in a Severity-0 violation. A Sev-0, (Severity-0) represents the most harmful violation to consumers and is the highest level of escalation with which a carrier will engage with Bandwidth. This applies to all commercial, non-consumer, A2P products (SMS or MMS Short Code, Toll-Free, and 10DLC) that traverse T-Mobile’s network.
With what I’ve shared so far, you may be able to recognize this as something that is not directed at regular customers that are using T-Mobile. The false information I encountered on the change misidentifies the affected partiers as subscribers of the phone service. Let’s dig into what a Sev-0 violation is.
- Phishing messages that appear to come from reputable companies
- Depictions of violenge, messages engaging in harassment, defamation, deception, and fraud
- Adult Material
- High-Risk content that generates a lot of user complaints, such as home offers, payday loans, and gambling content.
- Sex, Hate, Alcohol, Firearms, and Tabaco related content (SHAFT)
There is other content in this category. The above isn’t exhaustive.
Bandwidth list as having the highest fees messages related to phishing and social engineering at 2,000 USD per violation. Second, at a 1,000 USD fine is unlawful content such as controlled substances or substances not lawful in all 50 states. The lowest fine that Bandwidth mentions is 500 USD is for violations of SHAFT or messages that don’t follow state or federal regulations.
Overall, this looks to be a move that may motivate A2P partners to make more efforts to filter out certain type of content that is at least generally annoying if not worst.
What About the Other Carriers?
In the USA there are three nation-wide carriers. AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon offer service across the nation. I don’t know if Verizon or AT&T have fines associated with violations, but they do have a code of conduct for A2P providers. If you’d like to read their code of conduct documentations, you can find them here.
- AT&T Code of Conduct
- T-Mobile November 2020 Code of Conduct
- Verizon has adopted the CTIA Guidelines.
There’s a lot of overlap in their rules. This may come as no surprise, especially to those familiar with CTIA. CTIA is a wireless trade organization representing carriers in the USA, supplies, and manufacturers of wireless products. They have been around since the mid-1980s. Current members of CTIA include AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and US Cellular. You can find a list of members here.
There is a lot more that could be said about how these messaging services work. I may detail it further one day. But for now, the main take-away is that there’s a popular misconception about the changes that T-Mobile is said to be implementing that are recognized as a mistaken interpretation once one has a casual familiarity with some of the terms involved.
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There are multiple posting referring to this as “10DLC” and talking about the fines as of January 1st 2024. However, there is also a “Mobile Code of Conduct” pdf on T-Mobiles website from November 2020 that also mentions (not SHAFT) ‘hate speech’ but nothing further, nor does it refer to the fines associated with using such terminology.
Why can’t T-Mobile just come out and clarify on this, since everyone’s raising such a ruckus over it? I just had a call with T-Mobile asking for clarification, as I’m of German decent and my wife of Italian , and we both make off cuff racial jokes as play on words from our origins. If I get fined $500 for a joke, or my wife does, then T-Mobiles going to have a pissed off Italian lawyer on their hands, who doesn’t care to pay any more than she’s legally obligated to. Just saying!
Mosts of the posts that you found are likely derivative of earlier posts, and not from T-Mobile themselves.
Unfortunately, the timing of this misunderstanding was at an especially bad time. It was spreading on Christmas weekend. Christmas to new years is a time which many people are taking off from work and many systems get “frozen” in a working state since a lot of staff is missing. I’d expect more action on this after January 2, when many people are back to the office and various system freezes have expired.
In the mean time, I see Twitter has placed a community note on the govt representatives post that really gave this rumor legs, the T-Mobile subreddit is closing new posts on this and directing people to a thread explaining that this is not for subscribers.
I called customer service myself, and I found that different people have varied levels of knowledge on this. I assume someone from higher up in the organization will have to update the helping guides and get those distributed before customer care is able to give a consistent response.
Get an editor. Damn. Should be ashamed you published this with so many errors
🤷🏻🤷🏿🤷🏽 – Typos happen, as do corrections. Hopefully there was not something so bad as to obstruct my attempt at communicating and providing assistance in understanding the changes.
Censorship is censorship, whether it’s a person or a business. The government can define “hate” as whatever it feels like at any time. Can gun shops or firearm stores send mass communication? This is political and infringes on free speech.
This might sound odd to some. In the USA, Amendment One protects from Government censorship of protected speech. But it also generally protects private entities that making content decisions on expression conveyed with their resources or property. There are a number of cases from scenarios both online and offline involving censorship or content removal in which courts have affirmed the right to block the content. The govt or law forcing one to host or transmit speech that one does not wish to is generally compelled speech. 1A protects against compelled speech.
While in truth I don’t have an issue with say 3rd party texts being examined and potentially fined, I do have an issue with a few items of this.
1. Who is deciding what is appropriate and what is not? Will we wind up with companies being fined for providing information much like the Hunter laptop story was buried? Honestly, I don’t trust 30 liberals or 30 conservatives in a room to be very open about what they allow and don’t allow without a fine. Nor would I ever trust the government to make that decision.
2. What happens when I send out a mass message to my friends. Is there a cut off limit from when it becomes personnel to when it becomes, “acting as a company or political entity”? Suppose I am planning a party for 1 hundred coworkers, and for giggles I decide to call it “Rally for Bad Orange Man.” or some other play at the political elite…. am I suddenly going to be fined for each person who received it?
There seems to be a lot to doubt on this issue, further I have to say it smells of further efforts to quell free speech.
1) The various networks make their own decisions on what is acceptable. There is some overlap in what they consider unacceptable according to their guidelines. But their decisions are not identical. In 2007, Verizon Wireless decided for a while not to distribute some abortion related messages. They did later change their position. 3 years ago, all 3 nation wide carriers filtered out messages from a political candidate that was broadcasting messages to some that had not opted into receiving them. The messages had no clear opt-out language. They may also filter out or throttle messages if they result in a lot of customer complaints.
2) From your phone, you can send a message to multiple people at once. But that isn’t what these rules concern. A2P messages are not sent from a phone. You would have to register a 10 DLC code with a registry before transmitting. This isn’t something you would likely do for communication among friends.
For your party scenario, you would probably not establish a direct connection to the carriers for your message. You would likely go through a service that offers invite management services. That entity would probably have service with an A2P provider. Your messages may be subject to acceptable use policies at each level. I can’t speak for those providers, but if your invitees are of similar disposition and not inclined to express offense, it might not be an issue.
What about companies that send me 2A related information that I have opted for? Are they now going to stop me receiving such texts messages now so that I can read and buy things I’m interested in when it comes to firearms?
Concerning your question on gun related promotions, reading the Code of Conduct, it appears that provided that the party has engaged in some form of age-gating that the messages are likely to be fine. The November 2020 version of the Code of Conduct mentions ensuring that messages concerning firearms and alcohol be appropriately age-gated. I don’t see anything in the announcements of changes of the code of conduct that introduces new obstructions to them.