What are Bandwidth’s default rate limits for messaging?

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Mara Wallace

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Bandwidth has a rate limiting system for every account with Messaging APIs. To ensure that you get the best possible results while delivering your messages at appropriate industry standard rates, it's important to understand how the Bandwidth rate limiting engine works.

Every new account has the following default rate limit settings for testing purposes. The default rate limit is the same for SMS and MMS across all messaging types: 1 message per second (MPS).

If you'd like to request increased limits for high-volume messaging, please reach out to your Account Manager. Not sure who your Account Manager is? Please open a ticket with your Bandwidth Support Team or hit us up at (855) 864-7776!

Scope Rate Limit Description Default
Account Outbound dequeue rate The rate that Bandwidth will send your messages to the downstream carriers across your entire account.

P2P - 1 MPS

A2P - ∞, up to account limit
Per-number* Outbound dequeue rate The rate that Bandwidth will send your messages from a single phone number to the downstream carriers

P2P - 1 MPS

A2P - ∞, up to account limit

*For P2P, T-Mobile has a daily limit of 300 unique recipients per sending telephone number 

Important: Bandwidth doesn't have an inbound rate limit. However, upstream operators may throttle the rate at which messages are sent to us. Bandwidth will send messages to you as quickly as they're received, so it's critical that your servers are scaled to support inbound messages in this manner. If you’re expecting a very high volume of inbound MPS, please contact your Bandwidth Support Team to discuss your use case.

Why are there phone number based rate limits?

Traditionally, local numbers were only used in P2P use cases, which are intended for conversational traffic and expected to be consistent with human operation as defined in the CTIA Messaging Principles and Best Practices, which is why the per number rate limit was typically set at 1 MPS. As more carriers announce sanctioned 10DLC A2P programs, we'll likely see this limitation change. Another thing to keep in mind is that the account level rate limit will trump the per TN rate limit, so the account level rate limit is more important to focus on.

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