Canadian Operator Fees for Messaging

At the end of 2018, SMS and MMS traffic to major Canadian wireless operators became subject to significantly higher costs when Canadian operators announced additional fees they are charging for traffic to their networks.  

How does this impact my messaging experience?

These higher costs will impact Canadian messaging from the Bandwidth network, regardless of the use case. Bandwidth will be passing through these costs directly from our downstream partners in the near-term and launching a new Canadian Messaging product in Q2 to respond to higher destination network access costs.

Additional information about these charges

Starting February 1, 2019 when you send messaging traffic to Canada you will see an additional line item on your invoice, SMS Third Party Carrier Surcharge, that represents the cost of these fees imposed by Canadian operators for all your messaging usage to Canada. As we are passing the cost to our customers, there will be a month lag in seeing the actual pass through fees on your invoice. The initial charge for the February 2019 usage will show on your April 2019 invoice.

Guidance on operator fees

The table below with the Canadian Operator rates are meant as guidance only to assist Bandwidth Customers with the estimated cost they may see on their invoice. The rate is represented in Canadian dollars. These rates are subject to change by the Operators or due to currency conversion rate changes. The rate on your Bandwidth invoice will reflect the cost passed to us from our vendors using their conversion method to USD and may vary from the rates below.