Twilio

Twilio is a 3rd party cloud communications platform that goUrban uses to send SMS codes and SMS notifications.

If your sign-up/login method is via SMS, the SMS verification code is sent through Twilio.

In order to use Twilio, a sender ID registration needs to be set up (see below the list of countries that this applies for).

Sender ID

Up to 11 alphanumeric characters.
Accepted characters include the digits 0 through 9, and letters: A-Z and a-z.
To register a Sender ID the process takes 3-5 weeks.
The Sender ID is required for the following countries:
Armenia, Belarus, Chad, Cuba, Czechia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, Ivory Coast, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malawi, Mexico, Morocco, Myanmar, Nepal, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Palestine, Philippines, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tanzania, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, UAE, Ukraine, Vietnam, Zambia, Zimbabwe

The requirements to set up a Sender ID may vary from country to country. If you wish to register in a new country, please get in touch with the Customer Success Team.

To read more regarding the requirements for different countries, please click here to redirect you to the Twilio site.

Note: Only transactional messages should be sent through SMS. Promotional messages may result in the blocking of the Sender ID by authorities of the respective country.

How are SMS counted?

Not every message sent is counted and billed as 1 SMS. Depending on the length and contained characters it might be billed as more than 1.

Length

In general, an SMS can contain 160 characters. If it’s longer than 160 characters, it will be split up into 153-character long parts that are re-assembled on the recipient’s phone.

For example, a message with 234 characters will be sent and billed as 2 SMS.

Characters

A 160-character SMS can only contain characters that are available on the 7-bit GSM default alphabet.

If a character that is not on this table - like č or ž - is sent, only 70 characters can be sent in 1 SMS as a different encoding (UCS-2) is used. If it’s longer than 70 characters, the message will be split up into 67-character long parts that are re-assembled on the recipient’s phone.

A message with 234 characters containing č or ž will therefore be billed as 4 SMS.

Recommendations

Formulate your messages as short as possible and try to avoid letters that are not on the GSM default alphabet as more SMS will be sent due to needed encoding changes.