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Discussion on: Twilio Hackathon Help Thread

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gyocran profile image
gyocran

Hi. I need some assistance. I am trying to buy a number on Twilio that I can use from Ghana unfortunately SMS is not supported for Ghanaian numbers. I was thinking I could instead use any other number that supports SMS but I see that all of them can send and receive to domestic numbers only. Is there any workaround in this situation? Thanks in advance

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philnash profile image
Phil Nash • Edited

Hey @gyocran , it's definitely not the case that numbers only support domestic SMS. I would recommend you get a US number, they can send all over the world. Do make sure that you have geographic permissions enabled to send SMS to Ghana though.

Further to that, I just checked on our guidelines for sending SMS messages to Ghana. They suggest that:

Numeric sender ID is not supported to the Airtel and Glo networks in Ghana. Messages submitted with numeric would result in delivery failure. Send only with alphanumeric sender ID to these networks.

So you probably want to try sending SMS messages from an alphanumeric ID instead of a number, or you can use a messaging service with a number and an alphanumeric ID to cover both cases.

Note: when sending messages with an alphanumeric ID users cannot respond as there is no phone number to respond to. If you want to build a two way messaging application you might look into trying the Twilio API for WhatsApp instead.

Let me know how you get on.

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gyocran profile image
gyocran

Thanks for clarifying my issue with buying a number. Also, thanks for the additional information. I will have to reconsider some aspects of the project after this. I will keep you posted on how things are going. Thanks again.