Hello, everyone.
Derek Johnson with tatango.com.
Today is April 23rd, 2018.
And today AT&T just announced that they are rolling out a new wireless carrier pass-through
fee for brands, if they want to continue to text message via shortcode to customers on
the AT&T network.
Now, a wireless carrier pass-through fee is not something that is brand new.
All the wireless carriers except for AT&T, the majors in the United States have a wireless
carrier pass-through fee.
Now, it's called a wireless carrier pass-through fee because it goes from the wireless carrier
and then gets passed on to the SMS aggregator, the SMS aggregator then passes it on, and
again, with no markups here, they pass it on to the software platform, then the software
platform passes it off to the end-user which in most cases is the brand that is text messaging
their customers.
So, AT&T is saying, "Hey, these are my customers on my network, to get access to them and to
text message them or even MMS message them, you have to pay a little fee."
So, T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon, they also have their own carrier pass-through fees.
AT&T was the only one that did not.
So, come July 1st, 2018, if you want to as a brand, text message AT&T customers, you
will be paying a little bit more to do that.
And that because the carrier is passing it from the carrier to the aggregator to the
software provider, and then the software provider is passing it off to the brand which makes
it a little more expensive to send either an SMS or an MMS message to those customers.
So, what is the fee?
So, the fee is, there's two fees.
One is for SMS and one is for MMS.
The SMS fee is two and a half tenths of a cent per message.
So, just to be very clear, this is not two and a half cents, this is two and a half tenths
of a cent per message.
So, that's for the SMS.
For MMS, its three-tenths of a cent.
Again, not three cents, three-tenths of a cent to send an MMS message to a AT&T customer.
So, let me just review one more time so everybody has the numbers.
It's two and a half tenths per...two and a half tenths of a cent per SMS message and
then three-tenths of a cent per MMS message.
So, if you are a brand and you're sending to AT&T customers, you're gonna be paying
a little bit more.
That's the carrier pass-through fee to reach those customers.
So, there are some positives here.
I always try and look at the positive.
Now, the negative is you will be charged more to send SMS and MMS messages to those customers
that are on AT&T.
There's nothing...you can't do anything about that, that's just what it is.
I mean, we knew AT&T eventually was gonna come up with their own carrier pass-through
fee because all the other wireless carriers had it.
I think it just took a little longer for AT&T to do it.
So, now that it's been announced, which is also kind of nice, AT&T has given brands,
SMS aggregators platforms a real headway in terms of telling them when it's going to happen.
We've seen in the past with other wireless carriers that they've given a few days notice
where AT&T is giving...based on today's date, it's April 23rd, so we're talking April, May,
June, and then July 1st.
So, they're giving a considerable amount of notice where other wireless carriers in the
past when they've enacted their own wireless carrier fees, they've given maybe a few days
notice.
So, I do commend AT&T, and I do appreciate that they are kind of allowing the industry
to adjust and, you know, kind of make sure they're ready for this new fee.
So, there are also some benefits here.
It could have been way worse I think from an industry standpoint.
So, I'm going to go through some of the benefits.
The good news is there's no inbound fees.
So, Sprint and T-Mobile they have inbound fees.
So, those are wireless carrier pass-through fees that if a Sprint or a T-Mobile customer
sends a brand a message, SMS or MMS, they actually tack on a carrier pass-through fee
to those inbound messages.
So, AT&T was nice here, they only added that carrier pass-through fee to outbound messages.
So, that's a good thing, it could've been way worse, it could have been on all messages.
Another one here is the AT&T fee matches for SMS, it matches Verizon and T-Mobile.
So, it could have been, you know, many, many cents per message, it could have been way
higher than their competitors.
But it seems like they're kind of matching what the other wireless carriers, the majors
in the United States are doing.
So, Verizon and T-Mobile, it's about the same fee in their carrier pass-through fee.
Another nice thing is the AT&T fee is half the cost of Sprint's fee and Sprint is five-tenths
of a cent per message, and AT&T is gonna be half of that fee.
So, as you can see here, AT&T could have passed a wireless carrier pass-through fee that could
have been as high as Sprint which is five-tenths of a cent per message.
So, it could have been way, way worse.
So, those are some good things on the SMS side.
Now, in the MMS side, AT&T fees are cheaper than all of the major carriers.
So, that's a good thing, could have been way worse.
So, for AT&T, their fee, their carrier pass-through fee for MMS is 8.3 times less than Sprint.
It's 3.3 times less than T-Mobile.
And it's two-tenths of a cent cheaper than Verizon.
So, all these things are, I think, good news.
Even though you're gonna pay a little bit more, you're not paying a whole lot more because
it could have been way worse I think from a carrier pass-through perspective.
So, that's pretty much it.
Today is Monday, it'll be interesting to see how the industry reacts to this.
At least they have a lot of time until July 1st, 2018 to react, to adjust, but it is going
to take a toll in the industry because it is going to cost the brands a little more
to run their text messaging campaigns because now they're gonna have this new AT&T carrier
pass-through fee.
If anybody has any questions, comments, concerns, or just want to voice your opinion, feel free
to leave a comment in the comment section below.
Thank you, and again, this is Derek from tatango.com.