Finding the Best Routes for Your SMS Traffic

As you may be aware, at RingCaptcha, we use multiple SMS providers to ensure that our customers’ one-time password (OTP) traffic has the highest chance of reaching their end users in a timely manner. Of course, when a provider has an outage or downtime, our system reroutes all traffic through another provider – that’s to be expected, but we are also constantly testing our routes to ensure that customer traffic is on the best SMS routes with the fastest delivery times.

Our Findings

We thought it would be interesting to share with you some results of our route testing. The following insights are based on the last two months of test data for mobile carriers in Egypt.

The results in the above table show the average delivery time, for SMS sent to Egypt’s three major mobile operators, by our five main SMS providers. Green shows the fastest average delivery time for each carrier with red showing the slowest average delivery time.

From looking at the results, you may not think that there’s a significant difference in the delivery times. However, fast SMS delivery times are key when looking to optimize your OTP conversion rate (number of OTP converted vs. number of OTP sent). A couple of seconds delay in SMS delivery can be the difference between your new signup successfully completing their registration, or getting distracted, dropping off and forgetting about your service.

To further show you the difference in delivery times across different providers, the above table shows the (MIN, MAX) delivery time ranges for each provider to each carrier. As you can see the poorest performing providers are, at times, delivering OTP with significant delays.

No One Provider is the Best

An interesting point to note, that is visible from both tables, is that the provider with the fastest delivery times to Etisalat also has the slowest delivery times to Orange and Vodafone. At RingCaptcha, we can set which provider we want to send through for each mobile carrier. So, for example, our current settings for Egypt are:

Etisalat: Provider 5

Orange: Provider 1

Vodafone: Provider 1

We continually test and monitor these delivery times and make adjustments as needed.

To learn more about RingCaptcha and our optimized delivery routes, reach out to our team at hello@ringcaptcha.com or write to us via our chat box in the bottom right corner of your screen 🙂