How Twilio Supercharges Its Global Voice and SMS Network with NGN ICS

Twilio, the world’s leading cloud communications platform, orchestrates billions of interactions between businesses and their customers. To power its renowned “Super Network” and uphold its commitment to quality at a global scale, Twilio requires carrier partners that meet the highest standards of reliability, compliance, and performance.

After a rigorous evaluation, Twilio selected NGN ICS as a preferred global supplier for its international A2P SMS and voice termination routes. By integrating NGN ICS’s intelligent carrier network, Twilio enhanced its ability to deliver exceptional quality, ensure regulatory compliance, and achieve significant cost efficiencies, reinforcing its position as a market leader.

At a Glance:

• Client: Twilio (The world’s leading cloud communications platform)
• Challenge: Securing high-quality, compliant, and cost-effective voice and A2P SMS delivery for billions of monthly interactions across a complex global telecommunications landscape.
• Solution: A strategic partnership with NGN ICS, leveraging its carrier-grade global network featuring direct Tier-1 interconnects, intelligent AI-driven routing, robust compliance-as-a-service framework, and 24/7 proactive network monitoring.
• Results: A tangible increase in call quality and SMS deliverability in key international markets, enhanced network uptime, an average of 18% cost savings on partnered routes, and streamlined regulatory adherence across more than 140 countries.

Twilio empowers millions of developers and thousands of businesses to build and scale world-class customer engagement. Through a suite of powerful APIs, Twilio has democratized communication channels like voice, text, chat, and video, making them accessible and programmable for any application. The foundation of this platform is the Twilio Super Network, an intelligent, software-defined network that connects to telecommunication providers in over 180 countries. To maintain the “magic” of seamless, reliable connections, Twilio continuously vets and partners with elite carriers capable of meeting its rigorous demands for quality and scale.

As Twilio’s exponential growth continued, so did the complexity of managing its global traffic. The platform faced several critical challenges in its mission to provide flawless communication experiences:

• Ensuring A2P SMS Deliverability: For time-sensitive communications like one-time passwords (OTPs) and transaction alerts, message delivery must be instantaneous and reliable. Navigating a web of intermediary aggregators and inconsistent local networks can introduce latency and delivery failures, jeopardizing the end-user experience.
• Maintaining Voice Quality and Caller ID Integrity: Crystal-clear audio and the consistent display of the correct Caller ID (CLI) are non-negotiable for enterprise voice applications. Poor audio quality or failed CLI transmission erodes trust and diminishes call answer rates, directly impacting Twilio’s customers.
• Navigating a Fragmented Regulatory Landscape: Telecommunications regulations—from sender ID registration and content policies to data privacy laws like GDPR and anti-robocalling standards like STIR/SHAKEN—are complex and vary drastically between countries. Ensuring compliance on every call and message is a monumental but essential task.
• Optimizing Costs Without Sacrificing Quality: At the scale of billions of messages and voice minutes, marginal cost savings per unit translate into millions of dollars. The challenge was to find a partner who could offer competitive pricing through optimized routing without compromising the high-quality delivery Twilio promises its customers.

Twilio chose to integrate NGN ICS as a preferred supplier, embedding its robust capabilities directly into the Twilio Super Network. The NGN ICS solution was architected to solve Twilio’s challenges head-on.

1. Direct Global Network for Unmatched Quality:

NGN ICS provided access to an expansive global network with direct, Tier-1 carrier interconnections in over 140 countries. This allowed Twilio to bypass unreliable, multi-hop routes, resulting in lower latency and higher delivery success rates for both voice and SMS. NGN’s infrastructure, which handles over 3.25 billion interactions monthly, offered the proven scale Twilio required.

2. Intelligent, High-Fidelity Voice Termination:

NGN ICS’s platform utilizes AI-driven routing to continuously analyze path quality and automatically route calls via the optimal path, ensuring superior audio clarity. Crucially, NGN guarantees Full CLI support, preserving caller identity to maintain trust and improve answer rates for Twilio’s enterprise clients.

3. Enterprise-Grade A2P SMS Platform:

For messaging, Twilio connected to NGN’s high-throughput SMPP interface. The platform’s intelligent SMS engine optimizes each message’s path based on real-time delivery performance and cost. This focus on direct-to-operator routes ensures that critical A2P messages are delivered with maximum speed and reliability, backed by real-time delivery receipts (DLRs) for transparent performance tracking.

4. Proactive Compliance & Security:

NGN ICS acted as a proactive compliance partner. Its platform is equipped with deep regional expertise, automatically handling sender ID registration, content filtering to meet local regulations, and ensuring adherence to data privacy frameworks. For voice, NGN ICS’s network is fully STIR/SHAKEN compliant, helping Twilio combat illegal call spoofing and meet regulatory mandates.

5. Cost Optimization Through Intelligent Routing:

By leveraging NGN’s direct routes and smart routing algorithms—which balance cost and quality in real-time—Twilio achieved highly competitive termination rates. NGN ICS also collaborated with Twilio to create custom routing profiles, allowing for a flexible approach to cost-performance optimization based on traffic priority.

The partnership with NGN ICS delivered tangible and significant benefits for Twilio and its customers.

• 99.5% SMS Delivery Rate: In markets routed through NGN ICS, Twilio achieved a 99.5% SMS delivery success rate, with an average delivery time of under 2 seconds for critical authentication messages.
• Enhanced Call Quality: Voice routes managed by NGN ICS saw a 15% reduction in post-dial delay and consistently high Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) for audio clarity, reinforcing the perception of a premium service.
• Bulletproof Reliability: NGN’s geo-redundant infrastructure and 24/7 Network Operations Center provided an additional layer of resilience to the Twilio Super Network, contributing to uninterrupted service even during regional carrier outages.
• 18% Average Cost Savings: Through intelligent least-cost routing and optimized carrier agreements, Twilio realized an average cost reduction of 18% on the voice and SMS traffic managed by NGN ICS, directly improving gross margins.
• Streamlined Global Expansion: With NGN ICS handling the complexities of local and regional carrier compliance, Twilio was able to help its customers launch communication services in new markets with greater speed and confidence.

“NGN ICS has been instrumental in elevating our network performance. Their reliability, proactive support, and deep regulatory expertise help us deliver the quality our customers expect, anywhere in the world. With NGN as a partner, we confidently continue our global expansion, knowing our communications infrastructure is in excellent hands.”

— by a Director of Network Operations, Twilio

Twilio’s selection of NGN ICS as a preferred global supplier is a testament to the power of strategic carrier partnerships in the digital age. By integrating NGN ICS’s intelligent network, Twilio not only fortified its core promises of quality and reliability but also enhanced its operational efficiency and market agility.

This collaboration demonstrates that for global communications leaders, the right partner is one that operates as a seamless extension of their own network—a partner that is relentlessly focused on quality, compliance, and value. As Twilio continues to build the future of customer engagement, NGN ICS is proud to provide the intelligent, global carrier backbone that helps power millions of connections, one message and one call at a time.