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What Are Wireless Carrier Pass-Through Fees?

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I’m Derek Johnson with Tatango.com, and I’m answering the question, “What are carrier pass-through fees?” So in mobile messaging, when a brand wants to send a message to a consumer, the consumer is using a mobile network that could be AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, there’s a bunch of them.

Well, a lot of those wireless carriers charge an additional fee to send to their customers. And those additional fees are called a carrier pass-through fee, makes sense, right. The carrier, which let’s say is AT&T or T-Mobile or Verizon, has a pass-through fee, which actually passes through to the brand.

So the brand, if they want to message someone on Verizon will have to pay a little bit extra, a little fee to send to that phone number on Verizon, and they’re paying Verizon. It’s goes, passes through, it passes through, you know, we don’t collect it as an SMS provider, like Tatango, the SMS aggregator doesn’t collect it, it goes right to the wireless carrier.

So some wireless carriers will have pass-through fees on mobile terminated messages, which means the mobile message is ending up on the phone. Some wireless carriers will have it when the phone, the consumer, is texting the brand. So we call those mobile originated messages. Some will have it on both types of messages. And then, some providers will even have a carrier pass-through fee on MMS messages.

So you have text messages, MO and MT, mobile originated, mobile terminated, and then you’ll have MMS messages, mobile originated, mobile terminated, and depends on the carrier, each carrier will have their own pass-through fees for each type of message and whether it’s going in or out. So that’s the answer to the question, “What is a mobile carrier pass-through fee?”

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