@doctorfox Our bulk SMS provider records delivery status. If you send a message to anyone on DND via bulk SMS, the message is immediately Rejected. So we sent out a test SMS to everyone subscribed to our service and manually went through the entire delivery report and noted the numbers that immediately rejected the SMS.
Numbers that are no longer active will probably return Expired or Undelivered as delivery report.
So we just started testing our workaround
You can check it out on www.airsob.com
PS: itās still in alpha phase so the design is still nothing to write TC about.
How does airsob work?
Do you have your own dedicated sms gateway?
And how is it that you can bypass the DOD and other restrictions on the phone network end?
Simple. We send the SMS from an MTN number.
Highlights of a recent post i read on DND
@light, I am BIG fan of what you guys are doing with your shortcode traffic for Paysob 
If both are YES, then I am in 101%
P.S: @light any update on the regulatory stuffs for Paysob based on my earlier recommendation?
@spokentwice Since weāre sending the SMS from another mobile number, thereās no restriction. Itās just like when youāre texting someone else from your mobile phone. And we can easily maintain the N1.50. Actually, it costs us far less to send the SMS. The N1.50 is just what weāll charge the public if we do go live.
The keyword in that sentence is if. Because we may not. Thereās currently a heated debate within our team on how these new products are affecting the company. You see both Paysob and Airsob were built to solve problems we were experiencing on Netsob: they were never meant to be separate products themselves.
I was the one who decided to make Paysob open to the public because I saw how much it was helping us. However, it took us almost three months to prepare Paysob for public use and through out that time, we didnāt pay much attention to our users on Netsob and they suffered as a result.
Because of their complaints, I was forced to make Paysob a closed service so we can have more time for them. But some of our team members are still pushing that we totally close it off to external use so we can focus all our time to providing our current Netsob users an exceptional service.
So, the way things are going, Airsob may never get to be a public service.
N1.50 to all networks? Are the SMSs triggered and billed from an actual SIM card? I am very interested in how you guys were able to get the cost down from standard rate of N4
Thanks
@Dapo unfortunately, thatās one thing I cannot disclose.
I agree with your team on keeping FOCUS.
However, there is a massive upside if you develop a business around these projects. Think of airsob and paysob as AWS.
All of AWS was internally used on the Amazon marketplace. They have now turned it to more than $7billion company that it is today. If the scenario looks like this for you, please get your team to pursue them.
Na beg I dey beg oooooo
The team is not saying we shouldnāt pursue Paysob and Airsob as separate projects on their own. They are saying (like you just said) letās focus on Netsob first. We are already getting thousands of paying subscribers signing up monthly on Netsob and thereās a feature that we want to implement on Netsob that will increase our current revenue by over 120x.
But weāve not even gotten around to do it because the startup devil keeps throwing us one evil spirit after another. And the team is already working as hard as they possibly can just to keep us from dying and now Iām urging them that they should work on several projects at onceā¦ they think Iām a slave driver.
But, yea, I get their point. Itās just that sometimes I get distracted when we make a great product and Iām thinking about how many people it can help.
Oh! this is really bad news I was about to start bulk SMS business but this news can reflect the big business of bulk SMS market.