Why Your 10DLC SMS Campaigns Aren’t Getting Approved (Bandwidth Registration from Rejected to Approval)
- Sabrhub
- May 12
- 7 min read
Updated: May 19
If you’re a communications service provider (CSP) tasked with achieving 10DLC compliance for your customers then mastering 10DLC campaign approval is likely high on your list.
In many cases, you’re filling out forms and dealing with rejections for SMS campaigns and it’s taking forever. In fact, at the Comms vNext event in April 2025, Microsoft MVP, Michael LaMontagne, stated that his 10DLC campaign has been stuck for two months already.
You’ve got customers chasing you as they need to go live and carriers sending you what feels like the same correspondence without pointing out where the problems lie.
App-to-Person (A2P) messaging has never been simple. But with 10DLC compliance now fully enforced as of February 1, 2025, it’s become significantly more complex. Navigating registration (brand and campaign), compliance requirements, and the moving goal posts has turned into a time-intensive challenge for CSP voice services teams.
What is 10DLC Compliance?
10DLC stands for 10-digit long code. It’s a phone number type used by North American companies to send SMS messaging campaigns to people. These people might be businesses or individuals. Any number that follows this format is considered a 10DLC number: 222-333-4444.
Regardless of the recipient(s), these types of campaigns must now comply with 10DLC or face getting blocked (as of February 1st, 2025).
Messages that will be blocked if not compliant include:
Bulk SMS marketing campaigns
2FA/OTP messages
Text reminders
Low-volume 1:1 text conversations from UCaaS apps
Note: This 10DLC campaign approval does not apply to short codes or toll-free numbers used for text messaging.
What Used to Work (And Why It’s Broken Now)
It used to be the case that you could send A2P messages with few legal ramifications.
Sending SMS campaigns or one-to-one messaging using 10DLC numbers meant you could be a florist, a bakery, etc. and text your customers about their orders or broadcast your seasonal offers. For example, in the run up to Easter, both the florist and the bakery have special items and bundled discounts to advertise.
Today, due to 10DLC compliance, these brands (no matter how small or large) must submit a comprehensive manual form with details about the business, the audience, and the campaign.
What’s more, there’s no automated validation process with these forms. Instead, the form gets sent to the downstream SMS provider to validate all 30 categories to ensure compliance.
As a result, the number of 10DLC campaigns that are getting rejected is sky high.
Why 10DLC SMS campaigns registration are increasingly facing rejection on Bandwidth
You get the error message. Like 4773, for example. But that message doesn’t tell you how to fix it.
So you try your best. And you get it wrong.
Boom! Next rejection.
Days go by. Customers hassle you because they think this used to be a quick process.
So what’s the hold up?
Rejections occur for four main reasons:
“Copy this template” doesn’t work anymore: You can’t just use the same version as before and update a few details. It’s a new process every time. It has to be this way to ensure compliance and not skip over crucial details.
The Bandwidth checklist: This is a long checklist (rightly so to ensure adherence). But it’s also extremely time-consuming and provides inconsistent results. It’s manual guidance—not a foolproof plan.
Lack of audit tools before submission: Adding to the manual process is the fact that you can’t confirm everything is 100% correct before you submit it. Submission doesn’t guarantee acceptance—it just starts the process of potential rejections from various downstream parties (TCR, 3rd Party Vetting partner, SMS provider, SMS aggregator).
Most CSPs don’t have The Campaign Registry expertise in-house: Launched in 2020, dealing with TCR is still a new concept. Until the enforcement of 10DLC compliance at the end of 2024, it had very much been viewed as optional.
As a starting point, you must be familiar with SMS registration rules, how The Campaign Registry operates, and the Bandwidth 10DLC checklist (which is super comprehensive).
What is The Campaign Registry?
The primary North American mobile carriers (T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T) created The Campaign Registry (TCR) to vet and control 10DLC registration. While created by these carriers, it remains a third party organization and not directly linked or owned by any carrier.
The goal of TCR is to ensure consumers “benefit from an overall sanctioned and accountable ecosystem that will drive more relevant trusted messaging to their device”.
There is no direct registration available between end customers (brands) and TCR. This means every brand wishing to set up a new 10DLC campaign must work with their CSP or SMS provider to submit each new campaign.
What is the 10DLC campaign approval process?
Whether you’re an experienced messaging product manager or someone responsible for starting up the messaging arm of your business, there’s only a slim chance you’ve dealt with TCR before.
If you’re new to the process, setting up a campaign in accordance with CSP 10DLC compliance is similar to porting numbers to and between VoIP networks (except the submission form is somewhat longer):
Complete the brand submission form with help from your customer: This could be a delay in itself as end customers often don’t have all the information needed.
EIN and website compliance: Before campaign validation begins, checks are made to ensure your end customers are legal entities and are adhering to website compliance (terms and conditions, opt in/out, etc.)
Submit the form to TCR: Campaign validation begins and may get rejected with error codes but no explanations.
Passed to connectivity partner (Bandwidth): Reviews the campaign submission received from TCR, conducts internal review, and assigns phone numbers, and passed to a direct connect aggregator.
Passed to a direct connect aggregator: Reviews the campaign for compliance and determines whether it meets carrier requirements.
Carriers ensure 10DLC regulations are met: Block or pass through messaging traffic.
Note: If your customers are single person sole proprietors, they’re not supported by Bandwidth whatsoever.
The Bigger Problem: You’re Not in Control
It’s important to understand that at any of the stages in the validation process, your 10DLC campaign approval could hang in the balance. With any of these verifying parties, rejection could occur.
With every rejection comes a delay to your campaign. And when you’re not the one in control, this creates friction and tension between you and your customer.
To your customer, it feels like they’re providing everything you ask for (even if it’s wrong) but it’s still getting rejected and delayed.
CSPs rely on SMS providers to register brands and campaigns: There’s no internal ownership and you don’t get a holistic view of each stage or detail of rejection.
Carrier lock in: Relying on an SMS provider means you’re locked in to one carrier and won’t always benefit from the best rates or delivery.
Lack of portability, flexibility, and visibility: Being tied to a single provider is often a negative in the long term; reducing your ability to switch between carriers.
No in-house troubleshooting: You can't troubleshoot or improve your own approval rates. Everything you submit is at the mercy of TCR, aggregators, and your connectivity partner.
For owned CSP 10DLC compliance, you need to be in control of your own 10DLC campaigns.
You want to own your campaign so you have the choice in the future to always have the best carrier, the visibility of approvals and rejections, and the ability to continuously improve submissions and speed up the process for end customers.
While there are many UCaaS texting solutions on the market, what you need to look for is a dedicated 10DLC campaign approval tool. This is a step that comes before onboarding a customer onto any texting application.
The Solution to 10DLC Campaign Approval: Take Control With ContextRegister
The best chance of achieving 10DLC campaign approval the first time, and in as little as 10 minutes! Each brand is using ContextRegister to save 10+ hours to automate their 10DLC campaign registration.
The goal of ContextRegister is to provide brands a self-service route to achieving 10DLC compliance and get registered on the first submission.
This goal has been accomplished hundreds of times for CSPs using ContextRegister today.
Backed by industry expertise, months worth of learnings from manual submissions, and mature artificial intelligence (AI), ContextRegister browses the Brand's website, cross-references industry guidelines, and guides you to the best chance of first time 10DLC campaign approval.
As a direct result, CSPs can scale A2P messaging campaigns and replace the need for expensive and prone-to-rejection UCaaS texting apps.
If you’re serious about CSP 10DLC compliance, you can use ContextRegister to register brands with TCR and speed up the approval process.
On top of this, you also benefit from:
ContextRegister is carrier-agnostic; meaning you can own your own campaigns as a CSP and switch to any SMS carrier in the future.
Integration with NetSapiens, Unity, Pidge, Teammate, Textable, Bandwidth, Sinch, Infobip, Bird, Heymarket, FalkonSMS, BeeTexting or any other texting apps.
Full TCR and 10DLC compliance.
How does ContextRegister work?
The 10DLC Agent removes the need for manual submissions on Microsoft Word and walks you through a web-based, step-by-step validation for:
EIN + legal name
Privacy policy
Terms of service
Website checks (SSL Certificate, Sitemap, Opt-in form)
Opt-in form logic, language, and disclaimers
Targeted feedback for fixing issues
Submit your Brand and Campaign for approval in as little as 10 minutes with ContextRegister Using AI, you reduce the manual form filling and guesswork. The upfront and ongoing compliance checks dramatically reduce the chance of rejection at the last hurdle.
The interoperability with downstream carriers and SMS providers means you always have access to the best provider for the job and don’t get tied into a single carrier.
For carrier-agnostic SMS, choose the CSP-owned, AI-powered campaign compliance assistant:
ContextRegister | Manual Submission Processes |
Automated validation <1min | Manual checklists |
Ongoing compliance checks | One-time check |
Support for any downstream carrier | Tied to a single SMS provider |
Live campaign status dashboards for CSPs | No visibility |
Built in support flows, webhook options, and email triggers | No automation |
If you’re losing time (and sleep!) over 10DLC campaign approvals, are knee-deep in 804 rejections, or customers are requesting different carriers, you need the best 10DLC automation tool on the market.
