Are grey roads and SIM card farms damaging your customers' trust?

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When budgets are tight, sending cheap bulk SMS messages may seem appealing, but businesses that do so risk wasting time, money and damaging their brand image.

Consumer noise is at an all-time high and businesses are having to work harder than ever to retain customers. Grey roads and SIM farms may sound like a good business move in theory, but they can damage the relationships you’ve worked so hard to build.

Grey roads and SIM card farms are questionable in terms of the law and can be extremely bad for business.

Business SMS sent through a grey route are cheaper, but typically do not come with good KPI guarantees such as timeliness, proof of receipt, or speed of delivery. Given today’s increased cyber threat environment, their lack of data security guarantees also poses a serious risk to the business and its reputation.

Aside from the real customer service issue this poses, you could simply be wasting time and money you've invested, while compromising your customer relationships and brand credibility in the process.

What are gray roads?
Business SMS, or A2P (application-to-person) flows are typically sent according to the host network protocols. If A2P messages are routed globally over routes that do not share a bulk-sending roaming agreement, hosts are not compensated for their services and there is little oversight over message security and quality.

Grey routes (as opposed to direct or white routes) confuse communication pakistan whatsapp list networks by bouncing messages between multiple networks during the journey between the sender and the recipient to disguise the origin of the message. In practice, this works like this: a message is sent from France to a recipient also located in France. However, instead of being sent directly from the sending network to the receiving network, it is passed through other networks around the world and eventually returned to France at a reduced cost to the sender.

While using grey routes is not technically illegal, the practice is unethical because it means the sender avoids paying interconnection fees between the networks involved. Grey routes operate a service that was originally designed for travelers to freely use their phones abroad and was never intended for business use for sending bulk messages.

The SMS sending quote you received seems too good to be true? This is probably why
Grey routes and SIM farms seem competitive, especially when compared to a quote from a provider that pays their suppliers and uses direct routes. But their strategy has obvious flaws that could cost you time and money, damage your reputation, and drive away the customers you want to communicate with first.

Compromising customers and data
Grey routes, from an information security perspective, are a huge liability. Customer data is not secure and the content of the message can be accessed, read, copied or modified. This makes SMS messages delivered through grey routes extremely vulnerable to malicious content, meaning you run the very real risk of exposing recipients – your customers – to completely unnecessary risks, while also damaging your brand credibility.

Receiving and sending speed is a problem
Messages sent through grey routes can be stalled or delayed; they can also get lost and never reach their recipients. There is a complete lack of traceability and ultimately no way to know as a commercial sender if your message has been delivered, as there are no delivery receipts.

There are several technologies to identify and remove gray routes. The cutting-edge technology detects SMS sent through gray routes by analyzing the real time messages spend on the network. This technology not only detects spam but also monitors message behaviors, trends, etc.

Since gray routes represent a significant revenue loss for operators, they are closed by host networks as soon as they are identified, so messages being sent on that route disappear without a trace.