You may have heard the term ‘grey routes’ in the industry but what are they and what do they mean to your business?
If you’re not sure what a grey route is, you’re not alone. In fact, you’d be joining a majority of our website visitors.
We recently conducted a survey, published in our latest eBook, which found that almost 90% of our UK website visitors didn’t know what was meant by the term “grey routing”, and equally didn’t understand the implications.
In the same survey, we also asked whether the reliability and security of messages is more important than the price – and more than 60% chose the former. So we know message quality matters to you.
When choosing to put your business’ trust in the hands of a communications provider, understanding the various delivery routes your messages can take and the differing quality of them is fundamental in ensuring your message is delivered.
What is routing in the context of SMS?
It’s the means by which your message reaches your recipient’s handset. In the world of business SMS, there are three routes: white (good), black (illegal) and grey (not illegal but not necessarily desirable, as we’re about to see).
The quality of service you receive really depends on which of these routes your SMS provider uses.
The mobile phone networks – O2, Three, Vodafone and EE – make a key distinction between messages for business use known as A2P (application to person) and messages for personal use known as P2P (person to person).
Business messages are supposed to go down specific white routes which are secure, reliable and fast; equally, this premium service comes with a network charge. It is possible to skip this network charge by using grey routes, and, in doing so, offer very low prices for business SMS.
Where grey routes differ from intended business SMS routes
The temptation of grey routes is that they offer what initially appears to be the same service for a lower price. However, the devil is in the detail.
Despite the originator (the sender) and destination (the recipient’s handset) being in the same country, the message data is transmitted using international networks for free disguised as a personal message.
This can open up your messages to various security risks, as you lose all data protection sureties and become vulnerable to personal details being stolen.
Because your message is jumping from network to network, messages are likely to be delivered slowly.
Moreover, because the mobile phone networks are actively searching for this sort of activity and shutting it down, there is no guarantee that messages will be delivered at all.
Grey route fraud will cost the industry $82 billion by 2020 (Mobilesquared).
Our “What is grey routing?” eBook contains all you need to know to help you understand the affects of grey routing on your business and the telecommunications industry.
