Sprint Premium SMS Message Flow (Updated)

Sprint is changing the way gateway providers interact with Sprint's message delivery and billing systems. Whereas content providers just deliver the proper premium sms message to gateway providers like Quios, we work behind the scenes to (i) deliver the content to the cell phone user; (ii) initiate a billing transaction with Sprint's billing system.

Previously, we were first initiating a billing transaction before attempting to deliver the content. Sprint is now requiring us to reverse this message flow, and first attempt to deliver the content, before initiating a billing transaction.

The message flow change will take effect on Wed. May 9th between 2am and 4am PT.

Customers do not need to change anything on their side. As is the case with the other carriers, Quios will perform retries on all failed billing transactions to optimize the success billing ratio.


We don't expect this change to have any material effect on success billing ratios. It will reduce the number of complaints from consumers about being charged for content that was never delivered. On the other hand, this new system could lead to content being delivered successfully without being charged (ie. message delivery succeeds but billing fails).


UPDATE: Sprint has warned aggregators to expect a reduction in success billing ratios of up to 25-30%, part of which is due to the rationalization of delinquent subscribers on their network. However, we have no further visibility on how this will affect individual content providers.