Add Russia to supported countries for Matrix Identity server in SMS gateway with +7 phone number code about sydent

[MurzNN]

And will be good to publish list of countries, that have SMS support in Matrix.org now.

[MurzNN]

If OpenMarket really don't support Russia - #49 is another issue for ability to add other SMS gateways.

[MurzNN]

@ara4n can you describe which tariff Matrix.org use in OpenMarket, maybe it have Russia in blacklist? If yes, maybe they can extend tariff plan for add Russia?
Many Russian users want to be in Matrix with phone numbers! :) At least for find friends in Matrix via phone number from mobile device address book, like in Telegram.

[ara4n]

@lampholder do you know the story here?

[lampholder]

Russia is unfortunately on the list of countries for which we need to register an alpha originator or purchase a local shortcode. I'll follow up with OM to see how easily we could add Russia to our list of supported territories.

[ara4n]

I think the concern here is that empirically it was working before we added the blacklist. Can we just deblacklist it and see what happens?

…

[lampholder]

Deblacklisting is easy; seeing what happens is harder. We'd need to do some work to capture DRs (which OM does at least support in Russia). As we know - confirming receipt of a single message empirically proves very little in SMSland :D

The danger to which we expose ourselves, the danger the blacklist was introduced to avoid, was silent msisdn-registration failures that are neither advertised to the user (so they just wait until they get bored and never finish registration) nor reported to us for us to maintain. At the time we decided "predictable restrictions" were preferable to unpredictable behaviour.

It might be a better user experience to just change the blacklist to a greylist - advise users that "there's no guarantee messages to Xland will work, but you're welcome to try".

What do you think?

[lampholder]

Also, I followed up on how easy it is to be registered in Russia - it looks like we'd need a local business entity in order to register properly.

[lampholder]

More news from OM: tl;dr I've changed my mind and now think we should deblacklist Russia 😄

• OM's Support org reckons it will probably 'just work' and has some levers they can pull if we're seeing poor delivery rates
• Our AM at OM has offered to review traffic with us so that we can have visibility on delivery rates (crucially, in a way that I can handle without any dev resource pivoting to handle DRs in Sydent).

I'll get Dave to do the needful and catchup with OM AM in a month.

[MurzNN]

I can help you with testing SMS delivery to several mobile operators of Russian country.

[MurzNN]

Seems it already deblacklisted now, I successfully receive SMS wit code from Riot to Russian mobile operators (whole list):

• Megafon: tested, received normally
• Beeline: tested, received normally
• MTS: tested, received normally
• Tele2 (Rostelecom, NSS): tested, received normally

[MurzNN]

So, all Russia operators receive SMS normally, let's close issue! Thanks to Matrix developers and All glory to the Matrix :)

[lampholder]

@MurzNN thanks for your help with this! I'll try and liaise with OM semi-regularly to check ongoing delivery rates :D