My wife is a bit particular and when we moved in together want there to be a household phone. So we signed up with a VoIP service and things worked. When we bought a home together, life got more complicated. There were utilities, contractors, service people, deliveries, etc. One day we realized that some of these folks would frequently send texts to our house number instead of calling, which we would never receive. So we upgraded our VoIP service/plan with a SMS option, and it was great. We could both just keep up to date on all the various things and either of us could respond as our schedules allowed, on any of our devices. We could even send images as MMS would allow to make communication clearer ("See this is exactly where things are going wrong", etc.)
And as with many things in life, human nature has pretty much ruined it. To combat SMS spam, as far as we can tell, all business SMS usage needs to be approved through https://www.campaignregistry.com/ now. And recent years, it has been brought to our attention that the service we are paying for is really intended for businesses. We are increasingly hitting weird blocks on messaging due to being grandfathered in before TCR. It has gotten to the point where we are on the verge of registering a business just to keep our functionality. Except even just having a registered business may not be enough because TCR requires all kinds of detailed information about your business and its practices.
So we are at a bit of a loss what else to do here. We could concede and one of us gets the responsibility of the "designated" cell phone number to handle everything household related. It is further complicated by my being an Apple fanboi and her a Windows/Android zealot. If we both used Apple devices we could maybe finagle something out by buying a dedicated iPhone for the house number and then take advantage of the cross-device Messages interoperability. There is Google Voice, and even ignoring my dislike for them, I don't feel they can necessarily be trusted not to drop the product or ban us for arbitrary reasons. Additionally, when it comes to actual phone calls, while Google Voice can forward calls to a number, I am not aware of any option to use it directly with regular handsets like many VoIP providers offer.
Are there really no companies in this space serving personal users? If not, that would be an excellent business niche for the entrepreneural folks in the audience.
My phone # is a VoIP that forwards to my T-Mobile cell. SMS stopped reaching my phone because T-Mobile silently dropped them. I now forward them to my AT&T # (as long as I can) and to my email.
TCR explainer: The Campaign Registry is an industry-led effort to reduce spam, mostly spearheaded by T-Mobile. It isn't fully baked and is far too simplistically implemented.
It is supposed to (only) apply to SMS originating from biz. However, it is a wide and leaky net that captures both more and less than it should.
SMS from biz that pay/register with the TCR are unfettered; they can mass message. SMS sent from consumers via wireless carriers (like T-Mobile) are similarly unmolested.
But SMS sent from VoIP services (that compete with wireless carriers) get interpreted as biz-originated and get dropped silently.
Past that, another major issue with TCR is that it doesn't meaningfully discriminate between major SMS campaigns and the most minimal+routine SMS usage.
My biz clients provide product support to their customers and a handful of SMS messages may be involved. Even so, they are required to jump thru the same hoops as huge entities that send millions of SMS.
Within that context, I found that registering and working with TCR was so onerous/expensive that we're 1) ignoring it as long as we can and 2) considering workarounds.
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