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Glossary

CPaaS terms, defined

Plain-English definitions for the CPaaS terms you'll run into building communications: A2P 10DLC, STIR/SHAKEN, DLR, sender ID, RCS, OTP, SIP trunking, and number pooling.

  • Messaging compliance

    A2P 10DLC — Application-to-Person 10-Digit Long Code

    A2P 10DLC is the US and Canada carrier program for application-to-person SMS sent from standard 10-digit long-code numbers. Carriers require every business sender to register a brand and a campaign (“use case”) before long-code traffic is allowed through at full throughput — unregistered traffic is heavily filtered or blocked. Registration sets your per-message throughput and trust score, and applies once per brand and per campaign, not per message.

  • Messaging compliance

    A2P SMS — Application-to-Person SMS

    A2P (Application-to-Person) SMS is the umbrella term for any text message a business or application sends to a consumer — reminders, one-time passcodes, order updates, marketing — as opposed to P2P texting between individuals. Carriers worldwide treat A2P traffic as a distinct, more heavily regulated category, but the exact registration mechanics are set per country: the US and Canada require A2P 10DLC brand-and-campaign registration, while many other countries instead register an alphanumeric sender ID or apply their own local vetting scheme.

  • Messaging compliance

    P2P SMS — Person-to-Person SMS

    P2P (Person-to-Person) SMS is a standard text message sent from one individual's personal mobile phone to another over an ordinary consumer plan, with no business or application sending on either end. Carriers treat P2P traffic as low-volume and conversational, so it carries none of the brand, campaign, or sender-ID registration that application-to-person (A2P) senders must complete, and it moves at ordinary per-device throughput rather than the higher, registered rates carriers reserve for A2P traffic.

  • Voice trust & compliance

    STIR/SHAKEN — Secure Telephone Identity Revisited / Signature-based Handling of Asserted information using toKENs

    STIR/SHAKEN is the US telecom framework that cryptographically signs a call's Caller ID so the terminating carrier can verify where the call actually originated before it rings. Every call carries an attestation level — A (full attestation), B (partial), or C (gateway) — and carriers weigh that signal, alongside reputation, when deciding whether to label a call “Spam Likely” or block it outright. Higher attestation generally means a higher answer rate.

  • Voice trust & compliance

    Attestation

    Attestation is the STIR/SHAKEN signal that tells a receiving carrier how much the originating carrier could verify about an outbound call before passing it on. It comes in three levels: A (full attestation), meaning the carrier authenticated the caller and confirmed their right to use the calling number; B (partial), meaning the caller is known but the number's ownership isn't confirmed; and C (gateway), for calls entering the network from an unverified source. Terminating carriers weigh attestation when deciding whether to let a call ring, label it, or block it.

  • Messaging delivery

    DLR — Delivery Receipt

    A DLR (delivery receipt) is the status callback a carrier or messaging gateway sends back after an SMS, MMS, or WhatsApp message is submitted, confirming whether it was delivered, failed, or is still pending — and why, via a carrier status code. DLRs let a sending platform close the loop on every message instead of guessing from silence, and are the signal integrations use to retry a failed send or report an accurate delivery rate.

  • Messaging compliance

    Sender ID

    A sender ID is the identifier a recipient sees as the source of a message or call — a phone number, a short code, or, outside the US, an alphanumeric name such as “ORBIT”. Which sender ID types a country allows, and whether they must be pre-registered, is set by each country's carriers and regulators; sending from an unregistered or mismatched sender ID is one of the most common reasons a message gets filtered or blocked entirely.

  • Messaging channels

    RCS — Rich Communication Services

    RCS (Rich Communication Services) is the GSMA carrier standard that upgrades SMS with read receipts, typing indicators, high-resolution media, suggested replies, and a verified sender name and logo — while still landing in the phone's native messaging app rather than a separate app like WhatsApp. RCS Business Messaging lets a verified brand send these richer messages to Android, and a growing set of iOS, users through their default texting app.

  • Identity & verification

    OTP — One-Time Passcode

    An OTP (one-time passcode) is a short numeric or alphanumeric code sent once — over SMS, voice, WhatsApp, email, or generated by an authenticator app — to prove a user controls a phone number, device, or account before letting them log in, reset a password, or complete a sensitive action. Because it expires and cannot be reused, an OTP is one of the most common second factors in two-factor authentication and phone-number verification flows.

  • Identity & verification

    TOTP — Time-Based One-Time Password

    A TOTP (time-based one-time password) is a one-time passcode generated locally by an authenticator app — not sent over a network — using a shared secret and the current time. A user scans a QR code to add a shared secret to their authenticator app (Google Authenticator, Authy, Microsoft Authenticator, or Apple Keychain), then reads a new 6-digit code every 30 seconds. Because the code is generated locally and time-based, not sent via SMS or email, TOTP requires no phone number or email address, making it a privacy-first second factor.

  • Identity & verification

    Flash call verification

    Flash call verification confirms a phone number by placing a call that hangs up before the recipient can answer — the caller ID itself carries a one-time code as its trailing digits, so the code is read straight from the incoming-call number instead of an SMS. Because the call is never answered, there is no per-message SMS charge, and it typically costs a fraction of a text-based one-time passcode, especially at volume on Android, where an app can read the calling number automatically.

  • Voice infrastructure

    SIP trunking — Session Initiation Protocol trunking

    SIP trunking connects a business phone system — an on-premise PBX or a cloud UCaaS platform — to the public telephone network over a SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) connection instead of physical phone lines, so calls travel as data over an internet connection. It lets a company keep its existing PBX and phone numbers while modernizing how calls reach the network, scale call capacity up or down by adding trunks, and consolidate multiple office lines under a single connection.

  • Voice & messaging infrastructure

    Number pooling

    Number pooling is the practice of provisioning and rotating outbound calls or messages across a shared set of phone numbers, rather than sending everything from a single number, to spread volume, avoid overloading one number's reputation or throughput limit, and route by geography or use case. Messaging platforms pool numbers to keep per-number send rates within carrier limits; voice platforms pool numbers to spread outbound Caller ID across multiple registered lines instead of concentrating volume on one.

  • Messaging infrastructure

    Sticky Sender

    A sticky sender is a number-pooling strategy that maps a given recipient to the same sending number every time, instead of picking a different number from the pool on each send. The first message to a new recipient picks a sender deterministically, and that pairing is then remembered, so a reply thread — support, two-way SMS, appointment reminders — always looks like it is coming from one consistent number instead of a different one each time.

  • Messaging protocols

    SMPP — Short Message Peer-to-Peer

    SMPP (Short Message Peer-to-Peer) is the industry-standard protocol messaging platforms and SMS aggregators use to exchange text messages with mobile carriers and gateways at scale, independent of any single vendor's API. It defines how a sending application binds to an SMPP server, submits messages, and receives delivery receipts and inbound messages over a persistent TCP connection, making it the backbone protocol underneath most SMS APIs even when a REST API sits in front of it.

  • Messaging infrastructure

    SMSC — Short Message Service Center

    An SMSC (Short Message Service Center) is the network element inside a mobile carrier's core infrastructure that stores, forwards, and delivers SMS messages between senders and handsets — queuing a message and retrying delivery if the recipient's device is temporarily unreachable. A messaging platform or SMS gateway never delivers text straight to a phone; it submits each message to the destination carrier's SMSC over SMPP, and the SMSC is what actually completes (or reports the failure of) that final hop to the subscriber.

  • Messaging channels

    MMS — Multimedia Messaging Service

    MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) is the carrier standard for sending messages that include images, video, audio, or longer text than a single SMS segment allows, delivered to the recipient's native messaging app the same way SMS is. Businesses use MMS to send richer marketing and notification content — a product photo, a boarding pass, a signed document — without requiring the recipient to install a separate app, though carrier size and format limits still apply.

  • Messaging channels

    WhatsApp Cloud API

    The WhatsApp Cloud API is Meta's hosted version of the WhatsApp Business Platform, letting a verified business send and receive WhatsApp messages — template notifications, session replies, and rich media — through a REST API without operating its own on-premises WhatsApp server. It replaced the older self-hosted On-Premises API for most new integrations, and is the endpoint messaging platforms connect to for WhatsApp send, receive, and delivery-status webhooks.

  • Messaging infrastructure

    MCC/MNC — Mobile Country Code / Mobile Network Code

    MCC (Mobile Country Code) and MNC (Mobile Network Code) together uniquely identify a mobile subscriber's country and specific carrier network — for example, which network a phone number is currently registered on. Messaging and voice platforms use MCC/MNC lookups to route traffic correctly, apply the right per-carrier pricing and compliance rules, and detect when a number has ported to a different network since it was last checked.

  • Messaging infrastructure

    HLR lookup — Home Location Register lookup

    An HLR (Home Location Register) lookup queries a mobile carrier's subscriber database in real time to check whether a phone number is currently valid, active, and which network it's registered on, without sending it any traffic. Messaging and voice platforms run an HLR lookup before a send to catch disconnected or ported numbers, avoiding wasted spend and inflated bounce rates from dead numbers on a contact list.

  • Messaging infrastructure

    E.164 — ITU-T E.164 international telephone numbering plan

    E.164 is the ITU-T standard for formatting phone numbers so they're unambiguous worldwide: a leading plus sign, then the country code, then the national subscriber number, with the whole string capped at 15 digits. Virtually every messaging and voice API — including Orbit's — requires phone numbers in E.164 form (e.g. +14155552671) for send requests, webhooks, and stored contact records, since it removes any guesswork about which country a bare local number belongs to.

  • Messaging infrastructure

    MSISDN — Mobile Station International Subscriber Directory Number

    An MSISDN (Mobile Station International Subscriber Directory Number) is the actual dialable phone number assigned to a mobile subscription — the number a caller dials or a message is addressed to, written in full E.164 form with its country code. It differs from the IMSI, a separate identifier fixed to the SIM: a carrier network maps the MSISDN to whichever IMSI currently serves it, and updates that mapping whenever a subscriber ports to a new carrier or swaps SIMs, while the dialable MSISDN itself stays the same throughout.

  • Messaging infrastructure

    IMSI — International Mobile Subscriber Identity

    An IMSI (International Mobile Subscriber Identity) is the unique number stored on a SIM that identifies a specific mobile subscriber to mobile networks worldwide, distinct from the phone number itself. It's built from an MCC and MNC identifying the subscriber's home network, followed by a mobile subscription identification number (MSIN) unique to that subscriber. Networks use the IMSI internally for authentication, roaming, and HLR/HSS lookups — it typically never appears to the end user.

  • Messaging infrastructure

    HLR — Home Location Register

    An HLR (Home Location Register) is the central database in a mobile carrier's core network that stores every subscriber's IMSI, current MSISDN, service subscriptions, and which network element is currently serving them. An HLR lookup queries that record in real time to check whether a number is active, which country and carrier it currently belongs to, and whether it's a mobile or landline — without sending the number a message or placing a call to it.

  • Messaging infrastructure

    Number Lookup — Live Handset Check

    A number lookup (also marketed as a live handset check) is the umbrella product term for a real-time query against a carrier's live network that confirms a phone number is currently active and reachable, before any message or call is sent to it. HLR lookup names the specific mechanism behind most of these queries; number lookup is the broader term covering that check plus whatever carrier, line-type, portability, and SIM-swap data a vendor bundles into the result.

  • Messaging infrastructure

    Silent SMS — Silent Ping

    A silent SMS (also called a silent ping) is a standard text message sent with a protocol flag that tells the recipient's phone to process it invisibly — no ringtone, alert, or entry in the messaging app — while the network still logs whether the handset acknowledged delivery. Mobile network operators, and in some jurisdictions law enforcement, use it purely as a reachability check: confirming a subscriber's device is powered on and currently registered to a cell tower, without the subscriber ever seeing a message arrive.

  • Messaging delivery

    Message throughput

    Message throughput is the maximum rate — typically expressed in messages per second (MPS) — at which a carrier or messaging platform will accept traffic from a given sender before it queues, throttles, or rejects overflow. Throughput limits are set per number, per campaign, or per account depending on the channel and registration tier, so higher trust — a verified 10DLC campaign, a higher WhatsApp quality rating — generally unlocks a higher allowed sending rate.

  • Messaging compliance

    Opt-out (STOP compliance)

    Opt-out compliance is the legal and carrier requirement that every recipient can stop receiving messages from a sender at any time, typically by replying STOP (or a local-language equivalent), and that the sender honor that request immediately and permanently. In the US and Canada, carriers and the CTIA mandate STOP handling for all A2P messaging; a platform that keeps sending after an opt-out risks carrier filtering, fines, and complaints, regardless of whether the recipient originally consented.

  • Messaging infrastructure

    Short code

    A short code is a 5- or 6-digit number used to send and receive high-volume SMS and MMS in the US and Canada, commonly for OTPs, alerts, and large-scale marketing campaigns that a standard 10-digit long code's throughput can't support. Short codes are either dedicated (leased exclusively to one business) or shared (leased by several businesses using unique keywords to route replies), and both require a separate carrier vetting and approval process before activation, which typically takes several weeks.

  • Messaging infrastructure

    Long code

    A long code is a standard 10-digit phone number — the same format used for regular voice calls — that can also send and receive SMS and MMS. In the US and Canada, application-to-person traffic from a long code falls under the A2P 10DLC program and must be registered with a brand and campaign before carriers allow it through at full throughput; unlike a short code, a long code can also make and receive phone calls.

  • Messaging compliance

    Alphanumeric sender ID

    An alphanumeric sender ID is a text name — such as “ORBIT” or a brand name, up to 11 characters in most countries — that appears as the message source instead of a phone number, used widely outside the US and Canada for one-way SMS notifications and marketing. Because it can't receive replies, an alphanumeric sender ID suits alerts and OTPs but not two-way conversations, and most countries that allow it require the name to be pre-registered before sending.

  • Messaging infrastructure

    SMS gateway

    An SMS gateway is the system — hardware or, more commonly today, a cloud service — that translates messages between a sending application's API calls and the telecom protocols (like SMPP) carriers actually speak, handling routing, retries, and delivery receipts in between. A messaging platform's SMS gateway is what turns a single API call into the right carrier-specific message and routes the resulting delivery receipt back to the sender in near real time.

  • Messaging infrastructure

    Bulk SMS

    Bulk SMS is the practice of sending the same or templated text message to a large list of recipients at once, typically through a messaging API or an SMPP connection rather than one message at a time by hand. Platforms handle it by queuing the batch, applying per-number and per-campaign throughput limits, and returning delivery receipts for each recipient, which is what separates true bulk sending from a person manually texting a large group.

  • Messaging infrastructure

    MO/MT — Mobile Originated / Mobile Terminated

    MO (mobile originated) and MT (mobile terminated) describe the direction a message or call travels relative to the mobile network: an MO message is sent FROM a handset (a customer texting in), while an MT message is sent TO a handset (a business notification or reply). The distinction matters because carriers commonly price, rate-limit, and route MO and MT traffic differently, and a platform's inbound webhook typically fires on MO, not MT.

  • Messaging protocols

    Concatenated SMS

    Concatenated SMS (also called multipart or long SMS) is the mechanism that lets a message longer than a single SMS segment's character limit be split into multiple linked segments, sent separately over the network, and reassembled into one message on the recipient's handset. Each additional segment consumes another billable message credit, and encoding matters: GSM-7 segments hold up to 153 characters when concatenated, while Unicode (UCS-2) segments — needed for emoji or non-Latin scripts — hold only 67.

  • Messaging protocols

    GSM-7 / UCS-2 encoding

    GSM-7 and UCS-2 are the two character encodings SMS can use: GSM-7 is a 7-bit alphabet covering basic Latin letters, digits, and common punctuation, fitting up to 160 characters in one segment, while UCS-2 is a 16-bit encoding needed for emoji, non-Latin scripts (Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic), and characters outside the GSM-7 set, but fits only 70 characters per segment. A message automatically switches to UCS-2 the moment it contains a single unsupported character, shrinking the per-segment limit for the whole message.

  • Messaging channels

    WhatsApp template message

    A WhatsApp template message is a pre-written, Meta-approved message format — with placeholder variables for personalization — that a business must use to message a customer outside the 24-hour session window, or to start a new conversation. Templates are submitted for approval before use and are categorized (utility, marketing, or authentication), which affects both their approval bar and per-conversation pricing; an approved template can be reused indefinitely once live.

  • Messaging channels

    WhatsApp session messaging

    WhatsApp session messaging is the 24-hour window that opens each time a customer sends a message to a business, during which the business can reply with any free-form message — no pre-approved template required. Once 24 hours pass since the customer's last message with no new inbound message, the session closes and the business must switch back to a template message to reach that customer again, which is why timely replies matter for keeping a conversation in the cheaper, more flexible session state.

  • Messaging channels

    Conversational commerce

    Conversational commerce is the practice of completing a purchase — browsing a catalog, adding to cart, paying, and getting order updates — inside the same messaging thread a customer already uses to chat with a business, on channels like WhatsApp, RCS, and SMS, rather than redirecting them to a separate website or app. Marketer Chris Messina coined the term in 2015 to describe commerce conducted through chat and AI-driven conversational interfaces instead of traditional storefronts.

  • Messaging channels

    Conversational experience

    Conversational experience is the overall quality of a customer's back-and-forth interactions with a business carried on across digital channels — SMS, WhatsApp, RCS, web chat, email, and voice — as a continuous, contextual dialogue rather than one-way broadcasts or a form the customer fills out and waits on. It covers response speed, tone, and whether context (what the customer already said, on any channel) carries forward, and it can be delivered by a human agent, an AI agent, or a handoff between the two.

  • Messaging channels

    Conversational marketing

    Conversational marketing is a demand-generation approach that replaces static lead-capture forms and drip email funnels with real-time, two-way dialogue — a live chat widget, chatbot, or a messaging channel like SMS, WhatsApp, or RCS — to engage a website visitor or prospect the moment they show interest, answer their qualifying questions, and route them to a demo, a purchase, or a human seller instantly instead of making them wait on a follow-up email.

  • Messaging channels

    SMS geofencing

    SMS geofencing is location-based marketing that draws a virtual perimeter around a physical place — a store, venue, or delivery zone — and automatically triggers a text message when a customer's device enters or exits that boundary, provided the customer has already opted in to receive marketing texts. It powers hyper-local promotions, proximity alerts, and delivery or arrival notifications, and depends on a mobile app or location provider reporting device location plus a platform that can act on it in real time.

  • Messaging billing

    Conversation-based pricing

    Conversation-based pricing is WhatsApp's billing model that charges per 24-hour conversation thread — not per individual message — with the rate depending on who opened the conversation (the business, via a template, or the customer, via a free-form session message) and its category (marketing, utility, authentication, or service). A business can exchange any number of messages within one open conversation for a single conversation-level charge, rather than paying per message sent.

  • Messaging compliance

    Toll-free verification

    Toll-free verification is the US carrier-run vetting process a business completes before sending high-volume SMS from a toll-free number (like an 800 or 888 number), confirming the business's identity, use case, and opt-in practices. Unlike A2P 10DLC's brand-and-campaign model for long codes, toll-free verification is a single per-number submission reviewed directly by the carriers' toll-free registry, and an unverified toll-free number sending A2P traffic is subject to the same filtering risk as an unregistered long code.

  • Messaging security

    SMS firewall

    An SMS firewall is a carrier-operated (or carrier-facing) system that inspects inbound and outbound SMS traffic in real time to detect and block fraud, spam, and unauthorized routing — most notably artificial inflation of traffic (AIT) and grey-route messages that bypass a carrier's commercial agreements. Carriers deploy SMS firewalls to protect revenue and subscriber experience, and legitimate A2P senders can get caught in overly aggressive filtering if their traffic pattern or route resembles the abuse the firewall is tuned to catch.

  • Messaging security

    Grey route

    A grey route is a messaging path that delivers application-to-person traffic over a channel intended for person-to-person messages — bypassing a carrier's official A2P commercial agreements, fees, and registration requirements — to send at a lower cost than legitimate routes allow. Grey routing violates carrier terms and is a primary target of carrier SMS firewalls; traffic caught on a grey route is typically blocked outright, and a business whose messages are found in a grey channel risks its sender reputation across legitimate routes too.

  • Messaging security

    SMS Pumping Fraud — Artificially Inflated Traffic (AIT) / SMS Toll Fraud

    SMS pumping fraud — also called artificially inflated traffic (AIT) or SMS toll fraud — is a scheme where bad actors use bots or scripts to trigger large volumes of one-time-passcode or verification texts to premium-rate or fraud-controlled numbers, then collect a cut of the termination fees the sending business gets billed for each message. It typically targets an app's own OTP or two-factor login form rather than a carrier directly, since that flow sends a real, billable SMS on demand with no purchase or human recipient required.

  • Messaging security

    Snowshoe spamming

    Snowshoe spamming is the technique of distributing an A2P messaging campaign's send volume across many lightly used numbers, so no single number carries enough traffic to trip the per-number thresholds carrier filters apply. The name comes from the snowshoe analogy: spread the load and it never presses through. Carriers now detect the pattern at the sender-pool level rather than one number at a time, and Orbit's deliverability autopilot flags an over-spread pool as a snowshoe risk before the whole set gets filtered.

  • Messaging channels

    WABA — WhatsApp Business Account

    A WABA (WhatsApp Business Account) is the registered business identity on Meta's WhatsApp Business Platform that owns a company's WhatsApp phone numbers, message templates, and messaging permissions. No business can send on WhatsApp at scale without one: Meta reviews and approves the account and its display name, and every template message, session reply, and delivery receipt flows through the phone numbers registered to it.

  • Messaging compliance

    TCR — The Campaign Registry

    The Campaign Registry (TCR) is the central clearinghouse US mobile carriers appointed to register brands and messaging campaigns for A2P 10DLC traffic. Every business sending application-to-person SMS over standard US 10-digit numbers must register its brand and each campaign use case with TCR; carriers query that registry to decide the throughput, filtering, and surcharges that apply to a sender's traffic.

  • Messaging compliance

    DNC registry — Do-Not-Call / Do-Not-Disturb registry

    A Do-Not-Call (DNC) or Do-Not-Disturb (DND) registry is a per-country list — run by a regulator or telecom authority — of phone numbers whose owners have opted out of unsolicited telemarketing calls or messages. Each country sets its own scope, DND category rules, and scrubbing cadence; a business contacting numbers in several countries is responsible for checking each one's registry before a campaign goes out.

  • Marketing attribution

    Call tracking

    Call tracking is the practice of assigning a unique, trackable phone number to each marketing channel, ad, or campaign so that when a lead calls, a business can trace exactly which source drove that call and attribute the resulting lead — and its ROI — back to the specific ad, keyword, or campaign that generated it. It typically pairs dynamic number insertion on a website with call detail records and CRM integration to close the attribution loop.

  • Marketing attribution

    DNI (Dynamic Number Insertion) — Dynamic Number Insertion

    Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI) is a script embedded on a webpage that swaps the phone number a visitor sees in real time, based on the marketing channel, campaign, or referrer that brought them there, then forwards any call placed to that number on to the business's real line. It turns the displayed number itself into the attribution signal, so an inbound call can be traced back to the exact ad, keyword, or campaign that drove the visit — the same way a UTM parameter attributes a form fill.

  • Marketing attribution

    Call attribution

    Call attribution is the practice of crediting an inbound phone call to the marketing source that generated it — the channel, campaign, ad, or keyword that first brought the caller to a page. It assigns a unique tracking number to each source (via dynamic number insertion or static campaign numbers), then logs which number was dialed, so a phone conversion gets the same source-level attribution a form fill gets from a UTM parameter.

  • Voice & messaging privacy

    Number masking

    Number masking is the technique of connecting two parties — a customer and a driver, a buyer and a seller — through a temporary proxy phone number instead of revealing either party's real number, so the call or text routes through the platform without exposing personal contact details. It's the mechanism behind marketplace and delivery-app calling features, and the proxy number is typically reassigned or expired once the underlying transaction or relationship ends.

  • Voice privacy

    Masked calling

    Masked calling (also called bridged calling or proxy calling) is the technique of connecting two parties by voice — a customer and a courier, a passenger and a driver, a buyer and a seller — through a temporary proxy phone number, so the conversation reaches both sides without revealing either party's real phone number. The platform intermediates the call: each side dials the proxy number, the platform bridges the calls, and the proxy number is reassigned or expired once the underlying transaction or relationship ends.

  • Voice infrastructure

    DID (Direct Inward Dialing) — Direct Inward Dialing

    A DID (Direct Inward Dialing) number is a phone number a carrier assigns directly to an extension, ring group, or IVR menu on a business's PBX or cloud phone system, so an external caller reaches that destination without going through a receptionist first. Businesses provision blocks of DID numbers so each employee, department, or automated menu option gets its own dialable number while every call still terminates over the same underlying SIP trunk.

  • Voice trust & compliance

    CNAM (Caller ID Name) — Caller ID Name

    CNAM (Caller ID Name) is the database lookup that resolves a calling phone number to a display name shown on the recipient's phone, such as a business name instead of just digits. Carriers query a CNAM database — separate from the call signaling itself — when a call terminates, and an incorrect, missing, or unregistered CNAM entry is a common reason a legitimate business call displays as an unfamiliar number or generic label rather than the caller's real name.

  • Voice trust & compliance

    RCD (Rich Call Data) — Rich Call Data

    RCD (Rich Call Data) is the ATIS-1000095 standard that lets a verified business show a branded caller name, logo, and reason for calling on the recipient's phone screen instead of a bare number or a generic CNAM lookup. Marketed as “branded calling,” RCD rides on the STIR/SHAKEN attestation chain the terminating carrier already checks, carrying the verified brand in the call's signed PASSporT rather than replacing carrier authentication. Verizon and AT&T render a verified RCD payload on the incoming-call screen, commonly lifting answer rates beyond CNAM alone.

  • Voice compliance

    E911 (Enhanced 911) — Enhanced 911

    E911 (Enhanced 911) is the requirement that a phone system automatically transmit the caller's precise physical location to the local emergency dispatch center on any 911 call, rather than just the call itself. For VoIP and cloud phone systems, this typically means a registered location per device, extension, or physical address that updates whenever a user's location changes — a legal requirement in the US under Kari's Law and RAY BAUM'S Act for multi-line telephone systems.

  • Contact center (voice)

    IVR (Interactive Voice Response) — Interactive Voice Response

    An IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system is the automated phone menu that greets a caller and lets them navigate by pressing keys (DTMF) or speaking, routing them to the right department, agent, or self-service task before or instead of reaching a human. A well-designed IVR resolves simple requests — checking a balance, confirming an appointment — without agent involvement, while routing anything more complex to the right queue with the caller's selections already captured.

  • Contact center (voice)

    ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) — Automatic Call Distribution

    ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) is the system that decides which specific available agent receives an incoming call once it's been routed into a queue — typically by skill, agent idle time, or a configured routing strategy such as round-robin or longest-idle-first. An ACD sits downstream of the IVR: the IVR captures what the caller needs and picks a queue, and the ACD then picks the agent within that queue to actually ring.

  • Contact center (voice)

    Attribute-based routing

    Attribute-based routing is a call-routing strategy that matches an inbound caller to a queue or agent using the caller's own data — CRM tags, contact attributes, or a numeric value like account tier — rather than a fixed IVR menu path alone. A rule set evaluates the caller's tags and attributes against configured conditions and, on a match, adds required skills and/or a priority boost before the call enters the queue, so VIP customers or specialty needs reach a qualified agent faster.

  • Voice infrastructure

    Softswitch

    A softswitch (software switch) is the core call-control system that routes voice traffic between networks — deciding how a call gets from its origin to its destination, applying least-cost routing, and handling protocol translation between SIP, SS7, and other signaling standards — without relying on dedicated telecom hardware. It's the modern replacement for a physical circuit-switched exchange, and it's the layer that ultimately determines how a wholesale voice carrier terminates outbound calls onto the public telephone network.

  • Voice infrastructure

    SS7 — Signaling System 7

    SS7 (Signaling System 7) is the legacy signaling protocol stack used by the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) for call setup and teardown, SMS routing, and network intelligence functions like roaming and fraud prevention. Most calls still traverse SS7 networks at some point, even when both endpoints use VoIP, because calls ultimately reach traditional landlines or mobile carriers through the PSTN's SS7 infrastructure. Modern VoIP and wholesale voice carriers interface with SS7 networks through a softswitch or media gateway to reach traditional phone numbers.

  • Voice infrastructure

    SBC (Session Border Controller) — Session Border Controller

    An SBC (Session Border Controller) is the network appliance or software layer that sits at the edge of a VoIP network, controlling and securing every SIP call and its media as it crosses from one network to another — for example, between a business's PBX and a carrier's SIP trunk. An SBC handles NAT traversal, protocol normalization between slightly different SIP implementations, encryption, and protects the network behind it from toll fraud and denial-of-service attacks.

  • Voice trust & compliance

    Toll Fraud — International Revenue Share Fraud (IRSF)

    Toll fraud — also called International Revenue Share Fraud (IRSF) — is a scheme where an attacker who has compromised a PBX, SIP trunk credentials, or a calling API key pumps outbound calls to premium-rate or high-cost international numbers they control, then collects a cut of the per-minute termination fees the carrier bills the victim business for every connected call. It is voice's counterpart to SMS pumping fraud: the same revenue-share abuse pattern, but draining call spend instead of message spend.

  • Voice quality

    Jitter

    Jitter is the variation in delay between consecutive voice packets arriving over an IP network — even when packets are sent at a steady, even interval, network congestion or route changes can make them arrive unevenly, which distorts real-time audio if not corrected. A voice platform smooths jitter with a jitter buffer, which briefly holds and re-times incoming packets before playback, trading a small amount of added latency for smoother, more natural-sounding audio.

  • Voice quality

    Voice codec

    A voice codec (coder-decoder) is the algorithm that compresses analog voice into a digital format for transmission over a network and decompresses it back to audio at the other end, trading off audio quality, bandwidth usage, and processing overhead differently depending on which codec is used. G.711 is the classic, uncompressed toll-quality codec used across the PSTN and most SIP trunks; Opus and G.722 are newer wideband codecs that deliver noticeably clearer audio at similar or lower bandwidth.

  • Voice infrastructure

    DTMF — Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency

    DTMF (Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency) is the tone-based signaling system behind touch-tone dialing — each key on a phone's keypad generates a unique pair of audio frequencies that a phone system or IVR decodes to know which key was pressed. IVRs, conference bridges, and payment systems rely on DTMF to let a caller navigate a menu, enter an account number, or confirm a payment by pressing keys during an active call, without needing a separate app or interface.

  • Contact center (voice)

    Call whisper

    Call whisper is a contact center feature that plays a short, private audio message to an agent right before a call connects — announcing the queue, campaign, or caller language, for example — audible only to the agent, never the customer. It gives an agent instant context (which skill queue or marketing campaign the call came from) so they can answer appropriately without the caller hearing anything or waiting through an extra prompt.

  • Contact center (voice)

    Call barging

    Call barging is a supervisor feature that lets a manager join a live call already in progress — either silently monitoring, whispering privately to the agent, or fully barging in to speak with both the agent and the customer. It's a core contact-center coaching and quality-assurance tool, letting a supervisor intervene in real time on a difficult call rather than only reviewing it after the fact through a recording.

  • Contact center (voice)

    Call recording

    Call recording is the capture and storage of a phone call's audio — automatically, on-demand, or based on a rule (every call to a specific queue, for example) — for quality assurance, dispute resolution, training, and compliance. Because both call recording and its retention are regulated (two-party consent laws in some states and countries, PCI DSS for payment calls, and data-retention rules), most platforms let an admin configure per-queue recording rules, consent announcements, and automatic redaction of sensitive spoken data.

  • Contact center (voice)

    Call queue

    A call queue holds incoming calls in order — typically first-in-first-out, sometimes with priority rules — when every eligible agent is busy, playing hold music or a position announcement until an agent frees up. A queue is usually tied to a skill, department, or campaign, and its live wait time, position, and abandonment rate are core metrics a contact-center supervisor watches to judge whether staffing matches call volume.

  • Voice infrastructure

    Ring group

    A ring group is a set of phone extensions configured to ring together — simultaneously, in a set order (round-robin or hunt), or in sequence — when a call arrives at a shared number, until one member answers. It's a simpler alternative to a full contact-center queue and ACD, commonly used for a small department (sales, support, front desk) where any available person on the team can pick up an incoming call.

  • Voice infrastructure

    Call forwarding

    Call forwarding redirects an incoming call from its original number to another number or destination — a mobile phone, a colleague's extension, or voicemail — either always-on, only when the original line is busy or unanswered, or conditionally based on a schedule. It's a basic PBX and cloud-phone feature that keeps a call reachable when the intended recipient isn't at their desk, without the caller needing to know or dial a different number themselves.

  • Voice infrastructure

    Voicemail transcription

    Voicemail transcription automatically converts a voicemail recording's spoken audio into readable text, delivered alongside (or instead of) the audio file — typically by email, SMS, or directly in a messaging or inbox app — so a recipient can scan a message without dialing in to listen. It relies on automatic speech recognition, and accuracy varies with audio quality, background noise, and accent, which is why most platforms still attach the original recording alongside the transcript.

  • Contact center (voice)

    Answering machine detection (AMD) — Answering Machine Detection

    Answering machine detection (AMD) is the technology an outbound dialer uses to distinguish, within the first second or two of a connected call, whether a human answered live or the call reached voicemail or an answering machine — so the system can route the call appropriately, such as connecting a live human immediately to an agent while leaving a pre-recorded message on voicemail. AMD accuracy is never perfect, and misclassifications are an inherent tradeoff of detecting this within a very short window.

  • Contact center (voice)

    Predictive dialer

    A predictive dialer is an outbound calling system that dials multiple phone numbers ahead of agent availability, using a statistical model of answer rates, average call duration, and agent occupancy to predict when an agent will free up — connecting only the calls that get answered by a human to an available agent and discarding or dropping the rest. It maximizes agent talk time for high-volume outbound campaigns, at the cost of some calls being answered with no agent yet available (an abandoned call).

  • Voice trust & compliance

    Caller ID spoofing

    Caller ID spoofing is the practice of deliberately displaying a false calling number — one the caller doesn't actually own or control — to disguise the true origin of a call, whether for a legitimate purpose (a call center displaying a company's main number instead of an individual agent's line) or a malicious one (impersonating a bank or government agency to commit fraud). STIR/SHAKEN call authentication was built specifically to give terminating carriers a way to detect and flag unverified or likely-spoofed Caller ID before it reaches a subscriber.

  • Voice infrastructure

    Area code overlay

    An area code overlay is the NANP (North American Numbering Plan) practice of assigning a second, geographically overlapping area code to an existing region, so callers in that area must dial 10 digits (area code + number) for local calls instead of seven. Overlays are implemented when a region exhausts its available phone numbers under the original area code and has no geographic boundaries where a split (assigning the new code to a distinct part of the region) is practical, forcing a mandatory 10-digit dialing rule for all calls, local and long-distance, within the overlay area.

  • Contact center (voice)

    Local presence dialing

    Local presence dialing automatically places an outbound call so the recipient sees a Caller ID with a local area code matching their own number, on the theory that a local-looking number is more likely to be answered than an out-of-area or toll-free one. A platform implementing local presence maintains a pool of numbers across many area codes and selects the outbound Caller ID per call based on the destination number's area code.

  • Voice compliance

    Number porting

    Number porting is the process of moving a phone number from one carrier to another while keeping the number itself unchanged, so a business or individual can switch providers without reprinting materials or losing an established number. Porting requires the losing carrier to release the number and the winning carrier to activate it, coordinated through a formal request (and, in the US, a Letter of Authorization) rather than a simple account cancel-and-resignup.

  • Voice compliance

    LOA (Letter of Authorization) — Letter of Authorization

    An LOA (Letter of Authorization) is the signed document a phone number's current owner provides to authorize a new carrier to port that number away from its existing provider, proving the request is legitimate and consented to rather than a fraudulent or mistaken port attempt. Carriers require an LOA's details — the account holder's name, billing address, and account number — to match the losing carrier's records exactly, or the port request is rejected.

  • Voice infrastructure

    Toll-free number

    A toll-free number (an 800, 888, 877, 866, 855, 844, or 833 number in the US and Canada) lets a caller reach a business at no cost to themselves — the called business pays for the call instead of the caller. Toll-free numbers are commonly used for customer support and sales lines, and, when used for high-volume SMS, must complete toll-free verification separately from the standard A2P 10DLC registration long codes go through.

  • Voice infrastructure

    PSTN — Public Switched Telephone Network

    The PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) is the traditional, globally interconnected circuit-switched telephone network — the original copper-and-fiber infrastructure that connects landlines and, through carrier interop, mobile and VoIP calls to one another worldwide. Modern VoIP and SIP trunking systems don't replace the PSTN so much as connect to it: a call placed from a cloud phone system typically travels as SIP over the internet until it reaches a carrier gateway that hands it off to (or receives it from) the PSTN.

  • Voice infrastructure

    VoIP — Voice over Internet Protocol

    VoIP (Voice over IP) is the technology that carries voice calls as digital data packets over an internet or private IP network instead of a traditional circuit-switched phone line, using protocols like SIP for call signaling and RTP for the actual audio stream. VoIP is the foundation underneath SIP trunking, cloud phone systems, and most modern business calling — a call still may terminate onto the traditional PSTN at some point, but the leg from a VoIP phone or app travels as IP data.

  • Voice infrastructure

    WebRTC — Web Real-Time Communication

    WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) is the open, royalty-free browser standard for streaming live audio and video, or a data channel, directly between a browser or mobile app and a server with no plugin or native app install required. It handles media capture, network traversal (via STUN/TURN and ICE), and encryption (SRTP) under a single JavaScript API, which is what lets a browser-based softphone place a call or a video room stream live media the moment a page loads.

  • Voice infrastructure

    NAT (Network Address Translation) — Network Address Translation

    NAT (Network Address Translation) is the technique a router or firewall uses to let many devices on a private network share one public IP address, rewriting the source address and port on outbound packets and reversing the change on the way back. It's what lets an office share one internet connection, but it also hides each device's real address — which is why a WebRTC client or SIP phone behind NAT needs STUN, TURN, and ICE to find a reachable public address before a real-time call's media can flow.

  • Voice infrastructure

    Click-to-call

    Click-to-call (also called click-to-dial) is a button or link — on a website, in an ad, or inside an app — that lets a visitor start a phone call with a single click instead of manually dialing a number. It works one of two ways: connecting the visitor directly through the browser using WebRTC, or triggering a callback that dials the visitor's own phone first and bridges them to the business once they pick up.

  • Voice infrastructure

    PBX — Private Branch Exchange

    A PBX (Private Branch Exchange) is the phone system that manages call routing, extensions, voicemail, and features like call forwarding and ring groups within a single business, connecting internal extensions to each other and to the outside line via a trunk. A traditional PBX was on-premises hardware; a cloud (hosted) PBX runs the same call-control logic as a hosted service delivered over the internet, connecting to carriers via SIP trunking instead of physical phone lines.

  • Voice infrastructure

    CDR (Call Detail Record) — Call Detail Record

    A CDR (Call Detail Record) is the structured log entry a phone system or carrier generates for every call, capturing metadata like the calling and called number, start and end time, duration, disposition (answered, busy, failed), and route taken — without necessarily including the audio itself. CDRs are the primary data source for call billing, reporting dashboards, and troubleshooting a specific call's path when something goes wrong.

  • Voice quality

    MOS (Mean Opinion Score) — Mean Opinion Score

    MOS (Mean Opinion Score) is the standard 1-to-5 rating scale for voice call quality, historically gathered from human listeners judging recorded audio samples and now more commonly estimated algorithmically in real time from network metrics like packet loss, jitter, and latency. A MOS above 4.0 is generally considered toll quality (indistinguishable from a traditional phone call), while scores below 3.5 indicate noticeable degradation a caller would likely comment on.

  • Voice quality

    RTP — Real-time Transport Protocol

    RTP (Real-time Transport Protocol) is the internet standard for delivering real-time audio and video data — the protocol that actually carries a VoIP call's voice packets across the network once SIP has set up the call. RTP is typically paired with SRTP (Secure RTP) for encryption and RTCP for carrying quality-monitoring feedback like jitter and packet-loss statistics back between the two endpoints of a call.

  • Voice quality

    Packet Loss

    Packet loss is when data packets carrying a VoIP call's voice never arrive at their destination, forcing the receiving end to either drop that slice of audio or mask it, which is what callers hear as a gap, garble, or robotic-sounding word. It is typically caused by network congestion, a failing router, or an overloaded wireless link somewhere along the path, and is one of the three core metrics tracked alongside jitter and latency when diagnosing poor VoIP call quality.

  • Voice quality

    PDD (Post Dial Delay) — Post Dial Delay

    PDD (Post Dial Delay) is the elapsed time between dialing a call and hearing ringback tone or the call connecting at the far end. It's a setup-phase metric, driven by how long SIP signaling takes to cross the carriers between the originating and terminating network, not by anything in the audio path itself. Consistently high PDD — generally above one to two seconds — is a common early symptom of a congested or poorly-routed voice trunk, often showing up before any drop in call audio quality.

  • Platform fundamentals

    Webhook

    A webhook is an HTTP callback a platform sends to a URL your application owns whenever something happens — a message is delivered, a call ends, a reply arrives. Instead of polling an API for changes, your server exposes an HTTPS endpoint and the platform POSTs the event to it as it occurs, usually with a signed payload your code verifies before acting on it. Webhooks are the standard way CPaaS platforms push delivery receipts, inbound messages, and call progress events to your application.

  • AI & automation (AIaaS)

    AI voice agent

    An AI voice agent is software that answers a phone call, understands free speech in real time, reasons over the caller's context, and talks back — instead of routing callers through a fixed 'press 1' menu. It chains speech-to-text, a language model, and text-to-speech into one streaming loop, and can call external tools mid-call to look up an order, book an appointment, or hand off to a human with the transcript attached.

  • Voice infrastructure

    Call transcription

    Call transcription is the automatic conversion of a phone call's spoken audio into readable text — real-time, as speech streams during a live call, or post-call, from a finished recording. It runs on automatic speech recognition, and the resulting transcripts power search across call history, agent coaching and quality assurance, compliance monitoring, call summaries, and downstream AI workflows. Accuracy varies with audio quality, background noise, and how specialized the vocabulary is, so most platforms keep the recording alongside the transcript.

  • Messaging use cases

    Appointment Reminder

    An appointment reminder is an automated message — typically an SMS, WhatsApp message, or a call — sent to a customer ahead of a scheduled appointment to confirm, re-schedule, or prompt attendance. Because no-shows cost service businesses real revenue, reminder messages are among the highest-impact transactional use cases in business messaging: they cut missed-appointment rates while freeing staff from manual phone-tag follow-up.

  • Messaging use cases

    ETA Alert — Estimated Time of Arrival Alert

    An ETA alert (estimated time of arrival alert, sometimes called an arrival alert or a delivery-update message) is an automated notification that tells a waiting customer when a delivery, service technician, or courier is due — often in real time as the estimate narrows. Logistics, field-service, and on-demand businesses send ETA alerts over SMS or WhatsApp because an accurate arrival window cuts missed handoffs and 'where is my order?' support calls.

  • Platform fundamentals

    WebSockets

    WebSockets is a protocol that keeps one long-lived, full-duplex connection open between a client and a server, so both sides can push messages at any time without opening a new HTTP request. After a short HTTP upgrade handshake, the connection persists and either party sends data the moment it exists — which is why WebSockets is the standard transport for live chat, real-time dashboards, and streaming voice and message events.

  • Platform fundamentals

    Latency

    Latency is the time delay between a trigger and its observable effect — in networking, the time a packet takes to travel from sender to receiver; in voice AI, the pause between a caller finishing speaking and the agent's reply; and in APIs, the time between a request being sent and a response returning. It's usually measured in milliseconds and tracked alongside jitter and packet loss as one of the core metrics determining call and API quality.

  • AI & automation (AIaaS)

    Chatbot

    A chatbot is a software program that holds a conversation with a person over a text or voice channel, answering questions or completing tasks without a human in every exchange. Chatbots can follow fixed rules and decision trees, use natural-language understanding to match a message to an intent, or run on large language models that reason over each turn of the conversation.

  • Messaging security

    Phishing

    Phishing is a social-engineering attack where a malicious message pretends to be from a trusted brand or institution to trick the recipient into revealing credentials, payment details, or personal data, or into installing malware. It arrives over SMS (smishing), voice calls (vishing), or email, using stolen sender identities or long familiar numbers, and at an industry level it undermines trust in the branded communications legitimate businesses depend on.

  • Messaging channels

    Drip campaign

    A drip campaign is an automated series of messages — SMS, email, WhatsApp, or voice — sent to a customer over time instead of all at once, with each step triggered by a schedule or by what the customer does. A welcome sequence, a renewal reminder, or an abandoned-cart follow-up are typical examples: every enrolled contact moves through the same steps at their own pace, and each send respects the contact's consent state and allowed sending windows.

  • Messaging use cases

    SMS notifications

    SMS notifications are automated, event-triggered text messages a business sends to keep a customer informed about something that already happened — an order confirmation, an appointment reminder, a delivery update, a payment received, or an account alert. Unlike a marketing message sent to a whole list at once, each notification goes to one recipient at the moment a specific event fires, usually triggered by an API call or webhook from the business's own system.

  • Messaging infrastructure

    Validity period

    A validity period is the per-message time-to-live — how long the sending pipeline keeps trying to deliver before it stops and closes the message as expired. On the carrier side the SMSC stores and retries an SMS until it either succeeds or the window lapses; on Orbit a message whose validity period runs out before send terminates in the `expired` status rather than being delivered late or not at all.

  • Platform fundamentals

    Subaccount

    A subaccount is a full organization of its own created under a parent organization — with its own plan, API keys, users, senders, and wallet — linked to the parent by a single parent pointer (nesting stops there: a subaccount cannot parent another). It lets a platform, agency, or reseller separate billing, traffic, and per-resource attribution between its own customers without giving up control of the parent organization.

  • Platform fundamentals

    Sandbox (test mode)

    A sandbox (test mode) is an isolated sending mode you reach with a test-prefixed API key — a `dv_test_sk_` secret key or a `dv_test_pk_` publishable key — instead of a live `dv_live_*` credential. A send in test mode accepts as normal but terminates at the `test_sent` status with delivery simulated, so you can validate an integration, webhook handling, and flows without spending wallet balance or stamping carrier-side sender reputation.

  • Contact center (CCaaS)

    Agent presence

    Agent presence is the state machine a contact center's routing logic reads first — available, busy, wrap-up, paused, offline — recorded per queue membership and folded, per dispatch, the omnichannel capacity ledger, and supervisor wallboards, into a single worst-case state by severity. Dispatch only rings agents whose state is available; every other state gates them out of the next call or conversation the routing engine delivers.

  • Customer engagement

    Customer journey

    A customer journey is the full sequence of interactions a customer has with a business across every channel — SMS, voice, email, WhatsApp, video, and the contact center — from first contact through onboarding, day-to-day usage, and renewal or support. Mapping the journey means knowing which stage each customer is in and which channel to reach them on next, instead of treating every touchpoint as an isolated event.

  • Contact center (CCaaS)

    Live Chat

    Live chat is a real-time, text-based conversation channel embedded in a website or app, where a visitor exchanges messages with a business — typically a human agent, sometimes an AI assistant first — without picking up the phone or waiting on an email reply. Messages arrive instantly in a shared inbox, where an agent handles several chats at once or an AI answers routine questions and hands off to a human with the full history.

  • Messaging security

    Smishing — SMS phishing

    Smishing is phishing carried out over SMS: a text that impersonates a trusted brand and pushes a lookalike link or callback number, aiming to steal credentials, payment details, or personal data. SMS is an effective smishing vehicle because messages arrive in the same inbox as legitimate bank alerts and delivery updates, so a spoofed sender ID or lookalike domain inherits trust it never earned. Smishing waves also damage the impersonated brand, not just the recipients.

  • Messaging security

    Takedown (brand protection)

    A takedown is the process of getting an impersonating asset — a lookalike domain, a spoofed SMS sender ID, or a fake brand display name — removed from the infrastructure an attacker is abusing. The request goes to the abuse desk best positioned to act: the domain registrar, the hosting provider, the carrier SMS abuse desk, or the messaging platform. Detection and case tracking happen on your platform; the actual report is filed with the recipient off platform.

  • Platform fundamentals

    Throttling

    Throttling is when an API or messaging platform deliberately slows or rejects requests once a sender passes its allowed rate — returning an HTTP 429 'too many requests' response on an API, or holding excess messages in a queue instead of delivering them immediately. It protects the platform and downstream carriers from a burst that would degrade service for everyone, and unlike rate limiting, throttling usually queues excess traffic for later delivery rather than rejecting it outright.

  • Compliance & consent

    BAA — Business Associate Agreement

    A Business Associate Agreement (BAA) is the contract HIPAA requires between a covered entity and any third party touching protected health information (PHI) on its behalf. For a healthcare tenant on Devotel Orbit, the executed BAA records the permitted uses of the PHI you submit, commits the platform to the safeguards the Security Rule demands, and allocates breach-notification duties. Until an executed BAA is on file, PHI stays out of scope on Orbit.

  • Compliance & consent

    DPA — Data Processing Agreement

    A Data Processing Agreement (DPA) is the contract GDPR Article 28 requires when a controller hands personal data to a processor — on Devotel Orbit, that is you and us respectively. The DPA binds the processor to act only on the controller's documented instructions, under confidentiality, security-measure, and sub-processor guarantees down the chain, and to assist with data-subject requests and breach-notification duties. You preview and accept it from the Trust Center.

  • Identity & verification

    Two-Factor Authentication — 2FA

    Two-factor authentication (2FA) is a security practice where a user proves their identity with two independent factors — typically a password or PIN (something they know) plus a one-time code delivered by SMS, generated in an authenticator app, or confirmed by a phone call (something they have). A second factor blocks the stolen-password problem: even if an attacker knows the password, they can't act on it without also holding the phone or device.

  • Email deliverability

    Email reputation score

    An email reputation score is a mailbox provider's ongoing grade for a sending domain or IP address, computed from spam complaint rate, bounce rate, engagement (opens and clicks), spam-trap hits, and authentication pass rates (SPF, DKIM, DMARC). It is recalculated continuously and decides whether the next send lands in the inbox, the spam folder, or gets rejected. A sender can't read the exact score — mailbox providers keep it private — so healthy senders track the visible inputs instead.

  • Deliverability & fault containment

    Quarantine

    A quarantine is a holding state that removes a suspect artifact — a sender number, a webhook payload, or a call record — from its normal rotation until a fault clears, so further traffic or billing never depends on it. Orbit uses three shapes: a degraded sender number leaves the sending rotation automatically until its reputation cooldown ends; a webhook payload that fails a decryption re-save is withheld from replay; and a call record whose billing currency can't resolve is held uncharged rather than dropped or mis-billed.

  • Messaging delivery

    SMS tracker

    An SMS tracker is the tooling that follows a message's delivery status end-to-end — from the send API accepting it, through the carrier handoff, to a delivered, failed, or pending terminal state. It works by pairing the message ID returned at send time with the status callbacks (delivery receipts) carriers emit as the message moves, so a sender can answer for every message: where did it land, and if it failed, why?

  • Messaging use cases

    Order Notifications

    Order notifications are automated transactional messages — order confirmations, shipping updates, and delivery alerts — sent over SMS, WhatsApp, or email as a customer's order moves through each fulfillment stage. E-commerce and retail senders use them to keep buyers informed without a 'where is my order?' support call, and because each message references a real purchase it classifies as transactional rather than promotional traffic.

  • Messaging security

    TLS — Transport Layer Security

    TLS (Transport Layer Security) is the cryptographic protocol that encrypts data in transit between two systems — a browser and a web server, a SIP phone and a softswitch, or two API endpoints. In communications, TLS protects SIP call signaling so call setup details and caller information can't be read in transit, secures the HTTPS webhooks and REST APIs a platform exchanges, and encrypts email as it moves between mail servers. TLS succeeded SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), which is deprecated.

  • Messaging security

    Spoofing

    Spoofing is the practice of faking the identifying attribute a network uses to route and trust a communication — the caller ID on a phone call, the sender ID on a text, or the From address on an email — so it appears to come from someone other than the true origin. In telecom it is a broad umbrella covering caller-ID spoofing, SMS sender-ID spoofing, and email spoofing, and defenders and carriers assess each as a channel-specific variant of the same impersonation problem.

  • Customer data (CDPaaS)

    CRM (Customer Relationship Management) — Customer Relationship Management

    CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is the system a business uses to keep one organized record per customer — contact details, past conversations, purchases, and follow-ups — so sales and support see the same history instead of scattered notes across inboxes and spreadsheets. A modern CRM is the system communications channels sync into, so a call log, SMS thread, or chat from a CPaaS platform lands on the customer's record and gives staff full context before the next response.

  • Customer engagement

    Multichannel

    Multichannel communication means a business can reach its customers on more than one channel — SMS, voice, email, WhatsApp, and chat — and serves each channel as its own path a customer can use. It is the entry-level alternative to omnichannel: instead of one unified agent workspace, each channel is simply available, and a multichannel platform like Orbit hosts those channels side-by-side in one place, reporting on each channel separately as customers move between them.

  • Contact center (CCaaS)

    CCaaS — Contact Center as a Service

    CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service) is cloud software that gives a support or sales team everything it needs to handle customer conversations — call queues, IVR, omnichannel routing across voice, chat, and messaging, and real-time supervisor tools — without buying or hosting contact-center hardware. Where UCaaS covers a company's internal phone system and CPaaS gives developers raw API building blocks, CCaaS is the finished, agent-facing application purpose-built for customer support and sales teams.

  • Contact center (CCaaS)

    Omnichannel routing

    Omnichannel routing sends every customer interaction — voice, chat, SMS, WhatsApp, or email — into one shared queue and agent pool instead of a separate system per channel, so an agent sees the customer's full history no matter which channel they used last. One routing engine applies the same skills-based rules, priorities, and service-level targets across every channel, rather than each channel running its own disconnected logic.

  • Contact center (CCaaS)

    Wrap-up time

    Wrap-up time (after-call work) is the period an agent spends finishing administrative tasks — logging notes, selecting a disposition, updating a CRM record — immediately after a call or chat ends and before they're marked available for the next interaction. Contact centers track average wrap-up time as a core efficiency metric, since excessive wrap-up reduces the number of interactions an agent can handle in a shift.

  • Contact center (CCaaS)

    AHT (Average Handle Time) — Average Handle Time

    AHT (Average Handle Time) is the average time an agent spends on a single customer interaction from when it connects to when it's fully wrapped up — talk time plus any hold time plus after-call wrap-up work, divided by the number of interactions handled. Contact centers track it as a core efficiency metric: lower AHT generally means agents resolve more contacts per shift, though pushing it down too aggressively can hurt first-contact resolution and customer satisfaction.

  • Contact center (CCaaS)

    CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) — Customer Satisfaction Score

    CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) measures how satisfied a customer was with a single specific interaction, typically gathered right after a support call or chat closes via a short survey (“How satisfied were you with this interaction?” on a 1-5 or 1-10 scale). Unlike NPS, which asks about overall loyalty to the brand, CSAT is transaction-level — it tells a contact center how one particular agent, call, or resolution landed with the customer.

  • Contact center (CCaaS)

    NPS (Net Promoter Score) — Net Promoter Score

    NPS (Net Promoter Score) measures a customer's overall likelihood to recommend a business to others, gathered via a single “how likely are you to recommend us, 0-10” survey and calculated as the percentage of promoters (9-10) minus the percentage of detractors (0-6). Unlike CSAT, which scores one specific interaction, NPS reflects a customer's overall relationship with the brand and is typically surveyed periodically rather than after every contact.

  • Contact center (CCaaS)

    Wallboard

    A wallboard is a real-time dashboard — often displayed on a large screen visible to an entire contact-center floor — showing live operational metrics like calls waiting, longest wait time, agents available versus on a call, and service-level attainment. Its purpose is shared situational awareness: agents and supervisors can see at a glance whether the queue is under control without opening a separate reporting tool.

  • Contact center (CCaaS)

    WFM (Workforce Management) — Workforce Management

    WFM (Workforce Management) is the practice and software category for forecasting contact-center demand, building agent schedules that match expected call, chat, and message volume, and tracking real-time adherence to those schedules. Good WFM balances two competing goals: enough staff to hit service-level targets during peak volume, without so much overstaffing that idle agent time drives up cost unnecessarily.

  • Contact center (CCaaS)

    WFO (Workforce Optimization) — Workforce Optimization

    WFO (Workforce Optimization) is the umbrella discipline for improving contact-center quality and agent performance — call recording, quality scoring, speech and sentiment analytics, and agent coaching — layered on top of WFM (Workforce Management), which only covers forecasting, scheduling, and adherence. Where WFM answers "do we have the right number of agents staffed at the right time," WFO answers "how well are those agents actually handling each interaction," using recorded and scored conversations to guide coaching and process improvement.

  • Contact center (CCaaS)

    Call disposition

    A call disposition is the outcome code an agent (or an automated system) assigns to an interaction once it ends — resolved, callback requested, escalated, no answer, sale made — summarizing what happened for reporting and follow-up workflows. Disposition data feeds analytics dashboards and often triggers the next automated step, such as scheduling a callback task or updating a CRM opportunity stage.

  • Contact center (CCaaS)

    Blended agent

    A blended agent is a contact-center agent configured to handle more than one interaction type or channel — inbound and outbound calls, or voice alongside chat and email — rather than being dedicated to a single queue. Blending lets a contact center fill idle time between inbound calls with outbound work, or route lower-priority chats to an agent between voice calls, improving overall utilization without adding headcount.

  • Contact center (CCaaS)

    Conversational support

    Conversational support is customer service delivered through a natural-language chat interface — usually an AI-powered chatbot — that lets a customer ask a question in their own words and get an answer immediately, instead of navigating a phone menu, filling out a form, or waiting on hold for a live agent. Because it runs on natural language processing, it understands free-form questions rather than a fixed set of keywords, and it operates continuously without adding headcount.

  • Unified communications (UCaaS)

    Presence

    Presence is the real-time status a UCaaS platform shows for each user — available, busy, in a meeting, on a call, away, do not disturb — so a colleague can see at a glance whether someone is reachable before calling or messaging them. Presence typically updates automatically from calendar events and active calls, alongside a status a user sets manually, and syncs across desk phone, softphone, and chat.

  • Unified communications (UCaaS)

    Huddle

    A huddle is a lightweight, spontaneous audio or video call started instantly from a team messaging app — no scheduled invite or calendar meeting required — meant for a quick conversation that would otherwise be a string of chat messages. Anyone in the relevant channel or conversation can start or join a huddle, making it a fast substitute for walking over to a colleague's desk in a distributed or hybrid team.

  • Unified communications (UCaaS)

    Extension

    An extension is a short internal number — typically three to five digits — assigned to a person, department, or ring group on a PBX or cloud phone system, letting colleagues reach each other by dialing a short internal code instead of a full external phone number. A DID number can be mapped to an extension so external callers reach it directly, while internal calls between extensions never leave the phone system.

  • Unified communications (UCaaS)

    BLF (Busy Lamp Field) — Busy Lamp Field

    BLF (Busy Lamp Field) is a desk phone or softphone feature that shows the real-time status — idle, ringing, or on a call — of another user's extension as a small light or icon next to a speed-dial button. It's commonly used by a receptionist or team lead who needs to see at a glance which colleagues are free before transferring a call to them, without having to call and ask first.

  • Unified communications (UCaaS)

    Softphone

    A softphone is an application — running on a computer, tablet, or mobile phone — that lets a user make and receive calls over a UCaaS or SIP trunking connection without a physical desk phone, using the device's microphone and speaker (or a headset) instead. It gives an employee the same extension, presence, and calling features as a desk phone, useful for remote workers or anyone who needs to take business calls away from a physical office.

  • AI & automation (AIaaS)

    AI agent

    An AI agent is a system built on a large language model that can plan multi-step actions, call external tools or APIs, and use their results to decide what to do next, rather than only returning a single one-shot text response. In a CPaaS context, an AI voice or chat agent can look up an order, place an outbound notification, or escalate to a human — chaining tool calls together to complete a task, not just answer a question.

  • AI & automation (AIaaS)

    NLP (Natural Language Processing) — Natural Language Processing

    NLP (Natural Language Processing) is the branch of AI that lets software parse, interpret, and generate human language — turning a customer's free-form text or transcribed speech into structured intent a program can act on, and turning a reply back into natural-sounding language. It's the foundational technology underneath conversational AI, sentiment analysis, and conversational support: instead of matching a fixed keyword list or menu option, an NLP pipeline understands open-ended phrasing as written or spoken.

  • AI & automation (AIaaS)

    NLU (Natural Language Understanding) — Natural Language Understanding

    NLU (Natural Language Understanding) is the component of NLP that turns a person's free-form text or transcribed speech into structured meaning — identifying what the person wants (their intent) and pulling out the actual details (entities like dates, product names, or phone numbers) instead of matching input against a fixed keyword list. Where NLP covers both understanding and generating language, NLU is specifically the understanding step, and it powers intent detection in chatbots, IVR menus, and conversational AI agents.

  • AI & automation (AIaaS)

    Conversational AI

    Conversational AI is technology that understands natural-language input and carries on a human-like back-and-forth exchange — combining natural language processing (NLP) to parse what a person means, machine learning to improve over time, and dialog management to track context across turns and decide what to say or do next. It spans both text (chat, messaging) and voice (phone calls, voice assistants), and powers use cases like customer support agents, IVR replacement, and appointment booking.

  • AI & automation (AIaaS)

    Conversational UI — Conversational User Interface

    Conversational UI (CUI) is an interaction design pattern where a person completes a task by typing or speaking in natural language — through chat or voice — instead of navigating fixed menus, forms, or button taps. The system parses free-form input, holds context across turns, and replies in kind, so a single back-and-forth thread replaces what a traditional graphical interface would spread across multiple screens or an IVR menu tree. Conversational AI is the technology that powers a conversational UI.

  • AI & automation (AIaaS)

    RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) — Retrieval-Augmented Generation

    RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) is the technique of searching a business's own documents, knowledge base, or database for relevant passages at the moment a question is asked, then feeding those passages into a language model's prompt so its answer is grounded in that specific content instead of relying only on what the model memorized during training. RAG is the standard way to make an AI agent answer accurately about a company's own products, policies, or account data.

  • AI & automation (AIaaS)

    Fine-tuning (AI)

    Fine-tuning is the process of continuing to train a pre-trained language model on a smaller, curated dataset specific to a task, domain, or writing style, so the model's own weights adjust to that narrower use case instead of relying only on the general model plus a prompt. It's one of three main ways to specialize a model's behavior alongside prompting and RAG — and unlike RAG, the result is baked permanently into the model's weights rather than retrieved fresh at query time.

  • AI & automation (AIaaS)

    Tool calling

    Tool calling is the mechanism that lets a language model invoke an external function or API — looking up an order, sending an SMS, checking a calendar — as part of generating its response, instead of being limited to producing text alone. The model is given a schema describing each available tool's name, purpose, and expected parameters, decides when a tool is needed, and the surrounding application executes the actual call and returns the result back to the model.

  • AI & automation (AIaaS)

    LLM orchestration

    LLM orchestration is the coordination layer that decides which large language model call, tool, or prompt step runs next in a multi-step task — passing state and conversation memory between steps, routing a request to the right specialized model, and sequencing tool calls so a workflow completes reliably instead of relying on one single, one-shot prompt. It's the infrastructure layer an AI agent's tool-calling loop runs on top of, and what lets a workflow chain several models or tools together as one coherent task.

  • AI & automation (AIaaS)

    Guardrail (AI)

    A guardrail is a rule or check layered around an AI agent or model to constrain its behavior — blocking a disallowed topic, refusing an out-of-scope tool call, redacting sensitive data before it reaches the model, or validating a response before it's sent to a customer. Guardrails run before and after the model's own reasoning, catching issues the underlying model might otherwise miss or generate on its own.

  • AI & automation (AIaaS)

    Eval (AI evaluation)

    An eval is a structured test suite that scores an AI agent or prompt's behavior against a set of example inputs and expected outcomes, run before shipping a change and continuously in production, to catch a quality regression the way a unit test catches a code bug. Evals typically score accuracy, tone, tool-call correctness, and guardrail adherence, since a small prompt or model change can shift behavior in ways plain manual testing easily misses.

  • AI & automation (AIaaS)

    TTS (Text-to-Speech) — Text-to-Speech

    TTS (Text-to-Speech) converts written text into spoken audio, letting an IVR or AI voice agent read a dynamic response — an account balance, an appointment time — aloud without a human ever recording it. Modern neural TTS voices sound close to natural human speech, with adjustable tone, pace, and language, and can be generated in real time so an AI voice agent's text response is heard by the caller within a fraction of a second.

  • AI & automation (AIaaS)

    STT (Speech-to-Text) — Speech-to-Text

    STT (Speech-to-Text), also called automatic speech recognition (ASR), converts a caller's spoken audio into text a system can process — feeding an IVR's natural-language menu, a voicemail transcript, or an AI voice agent's understanding of what a caller just said. STT accuracy varies with audio quality, background noise, accent, and vocabulary, which is why a good voice AI pipeline is tuned for the specific domain (product names, account terminology) it needs to recognize.

  • AI & automation (AIaaS)

    Turn latency

    Turn latency is the time between a caller finishing speaking and an AI voice agent's spoken response starting to play — the round trip through speech-to-text, the language model's reasoning, and text-to-speech generation. Turn latency is one of the most important quality metrics for a conversational voice AI, since a delay much longer than a human's natural response pause makes the interaction feel robotic or broken, even if the eventual answer is accurate.

  • AI & automation (AIaaS)

    MCP (Model Context Protocol) — Model Context Protocol

    MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard that lets an AI application connect to external tools, data sources, and services through one consistent interface, instead of every integration needing its own custom, one-off connector. An MCP server exposes a set of tools and resources in a standard format; any MCP-compatible AI client or agent can discover and call them the same way, regardless of which underlying model it runs on.

  • AI & automation (AIaaS)

    AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol) — Agent Payments Protocol

    AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol) is an emerging open standard for letting an AI agent initiate and complete a payment on a user's behalf — such as an agent instructed to book a service or reorder a supply — with a cryptographically verifiable record of what the user actually authorized. It's designed to answer the trust question at the center of agentic commerce: proving an agent's payment request matches the human's real intent, not an unauthorized or hallucinated action.

  • AI & automation (AIaaS)

    Prompt injection

    Prompt injection is an attack where malicious instructions are hidden inside content an AI model processes — a webpage, a document, an email, or even a customer's message — attempting to override the model's original instructions and make it take an unintended action, such as leaking data or calling a tool it shouldn't. It's a top security concern for AI agents specifically, since an agent that reads external content and can also call tools has both the exposure and the capability to be misused.

  • AI & automation (AIaaS)

    Hallucination (AI)

    Hallucination is when a language model generates a confident-sounding but factually incorrect statement — inventing an order number, a policy that doesn't exist, or a wrong answer presented with the same fluency as a correct one. It's a fundamental risk of how language models generate text, and CPaaS voice or chat agents mitigate it with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to ground answers in real data and guardrails that catch an unverified claim before it reaches a customer.

  • AI & automation (AIaaS)

    Sentiment analysis

    Sentiment analysis is the automated classification of a message, chat, or call transcript's emotional tone — typically positive, neutral, or negative, sometimes scored along a continuous scale — using natural language processing instead of a human manually tagging each interaction. In a CPaaS or contact-center context it runs on inbound SMS, chat, email, and voice-call text in near real time, surfacing a customer's frustration or satisfaction to a live agent or triggering an automated escalation before a conversation ends badly.

  • Connectivity & numbering (NaaS)

    QoD (Quality on Demand) — Quality on Demand

    QoD (Quality on Demand) is a CAMARA network API that lets an application temporarily request a guaranteed quality-of-service boost — higher bandwidth or lower latency — on a specific mobile connection for a limited time, such as during a video call or a live-streamed event. Instead of a carrier over-provisioning every connection all the time, QoD lets an app request and pay for a short, targeted upgrade exactly when it's needed.

  • Connectivity & numbering (NaaS)

    SIM swap API

    A SIM swap API is a CAMARA network API that tells an application whether a phone number's SIM card has been swapped recently — a strong fraud signal, since a SIM swap is a common precursor to account-takeover attacks that intercept SMS OTP codes. A bank or platform can check this signal before sending a one-time passcode or approving a sensitive action, adding a network-verified fraud check on top of the OTP itself.

  • Connectivity & numbering (NaaS)

    Number Verify API

    The Number Verify API is a CAMARA network API that confirms a phone number genuinely belongs to the device making a request — checked directly against the mobile network rather than by sending an SMS OTP — letting an app silently verify a user's number in the background during sign-up or login. It removes the friction (and cost) of an OTP round trip for the common case of a user on their own registered mobile connection.

  • Connectivity & numbering (NaaS)

    Device Location API

    A Device Location API is a CAMARA network API that returns a mobile device's approximate location, verified directly by the carrier network rather than relying on the device's own self-reported GPS data, with the user's consent. It's used for fraud checks (confirming a transaction is happening near where the account holder's phone actually is) and for logistics or delivery use cases where network-verified location adds trust a spoofable client-side GPS reading can't.

  • Customer data (CDPaaS)

    Identity resolution

    Identity resolution is the process of matching multiple identifiers — an email, a phone number, a device cookie, a loyalty account ID — that all belong to the same real person, merging what would otherwise be several fragmented, anonymous-looking records into one unified customer profile. Without identity resolution, the same customer browsing on mobile, purchasing on desktop, and calling support looks like three unrelated people to separate systems instead of one.

  • Customer data (CDPaaS)

    Computed trait

    A computed trait is a customer attribute a data platform derives automatically from raw event and profile data — such as lifetime spend, days since last purchase, or predicted churn risk — rather than a value that was directly recorded somewhere. Computed traits refresh on a schedule or in real time as new events arrive, and are what let a marketing or messaging campaign target 'customers likely to churn in 30 days' instead of only filtering on raw, unprocessed fields.

  • Customer data (CDPaaS)

    Segment (CDP)

    A segment is a dynamically defined group of customers who share one or more traits or behaviors — for example, 'opened the last three emails but hasn't purchased in 60 days' — used to target a campaign, trigger a message, or personalize an experience. Unlike a static list, a segment's membership recalculates automatically as customer data changes, so a customer can enter or leave a segment the moment their behavior or traits shift.

  • Customer data (CDPaaS)

    CDP (Customer Data Platform) — Customer Data Platform

    A CDP (Customer Data Platform) collects customer data from every source a business uses — website events, purchases, support tickets, messaging history — resolves it into one unified profile per customer via identity resolution, and makes that unified data available to marketing, sales, and messaging tools for segmentation and personalization. A CDP's defining feature is that other systems can act on its data directly, not just view a report generated from it.

  • Compliance & consent

    TCPA — Telephone Consumer Protection Act

    The TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act) is the US federal law restricting unsolicited calls, texts, and faxes made using an automatic dialing system or a prerecorded voice, generally requiring prior express written consent before a business can send marketing messages or calls to a consumer. TCPA violations carry statutory damages per message or call, which is why messaging and dialer platforms build consent tracking, opt-out (STOP) handling, and abandonment-rate limits directly into their sending logic.

  • Compliance & consent

    GDPR — General Data Protection Regulation

    The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation — Regulation (EU) 2016/679) is the EU's data-privacy law: it requires a lawful basis (often explicit consent) before processing personal data, grants individuals rights to access, correct, export, or erase their data, and imposes breach-notification and cross-border transfer rules. For a CPaaS platform, GDPR governs every flow that touches personal data — contact records, message and call content, recordings and transcripts, delivery metadata — and splits responsibility between the tenant (the controller) and the platform (the processor acting on the tenant's documented instructions).

  • Compliance & consent

    PII — Personally Identifiable Information

    PII (Personally Identifiable Information) is any data that can identify a specific individual, either on its own — a phone number, email address, full name, or government ID — or in combination with other data a business holds. For a CPaaS platform, contact records, message and call content, recordings, and delivery metadata routinely contain PII, which is why access controls, retention limits, and export/deletion tooling around that data are compliance requirements, not optional hardening.

  • Compliance & consent

    DLT (India) — Distributed Ledger Technology registration

    DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology registration) is the mandatory registration system India's telecom regulator (TRAI) requires for any business sending commercial SMS, recording the sender's entity, message templates, and header (sender ID) on a blockchain-based ledger shared across all Indian telecom carriers. Unregistered senders, templates, or headers are blocked outright by Indian carriers, making DLT registration a hard prerequisite — not just a best practice — for sending SMS to Indian numbers.

  • Compliance & consent

    10DLC brand registration

    10DLC brand registration is the first step of A2P 10DLC compliance in the US and Canada — submitting a business's verified legal identity (entity name, tax ID or equivalent, address) to the shared carrier registry, which assigns it a trust score used to set throughput and vetting requirements for every campaign registered under that brand. A brand only needs to register once; every subsequent campaign for that business references the same brand record.

  • Compliance & consent

    10DLC campaign

    A 10DLC campaign is the second step of A2P 10DLC registration — describing one specific category of messaging use case (marketing, 2FA/OTP, account notifications) a registered brand plans to send, submitted separately per use case since each carries its own throughput and carrier trust score. A business with multiple distinct messaging use cases typically registers multiple campaigns under one brand, rather than one broad campaign covering everything.

  • Compliance & consent

    Consent management

    Consent management is the practice of recording, tracking, and honoring exactly what a customer agreed to receive — which channel, which message category, at what point in time — and making that record available across every system that might message that customer, so a suppressed or non-consented contact never gets a send. It's the operational backbone behind laws like the TCPA and GDPR, since having consent in principle only matters if the sending system actually checks it before every message.

  • Compliance & consent

    Quiet hours

    Quiet hours are the local time window — commonly overnight, such as 9pm to 8am in the recipient's own time zone — during which a business is legally restricted or required to refrain from sending marketing calls or texts under laws like the TCPA. Because recipients span many time zones, a compliant sending platform calculates quiet hours based on the recipient's actual local time, not the sender's, and holds or reschedules a message that would otherwise land during that window.

  • Email deliverability

    DMARC — Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance

    DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) is the email standard that tells receiving mail servers what to do with a message that fails SPF or DKIM authentication — quarantine it, reject it, or let it through — and sends the domain owner reports on authentication failures across the internet. DMARC is what actually enforces SPF and DKIM: without a DMARC policy, a receiving server may still deliver an unauthenticated message that merely fails those underlying checks.

  • Email deliverability

    SPF (Sender Policy Framework) — Sender Policy Framework

    SPF (Sender Policy Framework) is a DNS record listing which mail servers are authorized to send email on behalf of a domain, letting a receiving mail server check whether an incoming message actually came from an approved source or is likely spoofed. A message sent from a server not listed in the domain's SPF record typically fails SPF authentication, which is one of the signals a DMARC policy and spam filter both weigh when deciding whether to deliver it.

  • Email deliverability

    DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) — DomainKeys Identified Mail

    DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) attaches a cryptographic signature to an outgoing email, generated with a private key, that a receiving mail server verifies against a public key published in the sending domain's DNS — proving the message wasn't altered in transit and genuinely originated from an authorized sender. Unlike SPF, which checks the sending server's IP address, DKIM verifies the message content itself, which is why it survives email forwarding better than SPF does.

  • Email deliverability

    Bounce (email)

    An email bounce is a delivery failure reported back to the sender — a hard bounce means the address is permanently invalid (doesn't exist, domain doesn't resolve), while a soft bounce means a temporary issue (mailbox full, server briefly unavailable) that may succeed on a later retry. Sending platforms track bounce rate closely and automatically suppress repeat hard-bounce addresses from future sends, since a high bounce rate directly damages a sender's reputation with mailbox providers.

  • Email deliverability

    MX record

    An MX (Mail Exchange) record is the DNS entry that tells any sending mail server which server is responsible for receiving email on behalf of a domain, including a priority order when multiple mail servers are listed as backups. Without a correctly configured MX record, incoming mail addressed to a domain has nowhere to be delivered, regardless of how well SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are configured for outgoing mail from that same domain.

  • Email deliverability

    Sender reputation (email)

    Sender reputation is a mailbox provider's ongoing trust score for a sending domain or IP address, calculated from signals like spam complaint rate, bounce rate, engagement (opens and clicks), and authentication pass rates (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) — and it directly determines whether future messages land in the inbox, the spam folder, or get blocked outright. Unlike a one-time compliance check, sender reputation is continuously recalculated, so a sudden spike in complaints or bounces can degrade inbox placement even for a previously well-established sender.

  • Email deliverability

    IP warmup

    IP warmup is the practice of gradually ramping up email send volume from a new sending IP address or domain — starting with a small daily cap to engaged recipients and increasing it over a period of days or weeks — instead of sending at full volume immediately. Mailbox providers have no sending history to judge a brand-new IP or domain by, so a sudden high-volume burst reads as spam-like behavior and gets throttled or blocked; a gradual ramp lets sender reputation build alongside volume.

  • Email deliverability

    Spam trap

    A spam trap is an email address that mailbox providers and blocklist operators plant or repurpose purely to catch senders with poor list hygiene, since no real person ever opts in to receive mail there. The three common types are pristine traps (created fresh and never used by a real person), typo traps (a common misspelling of a real domain), and recycled traps (a formerly real inbox reactivated after long-term inactivity). Hitting even a handful can tank sender reputation or trigger an immediate blocklisting.

  • Platform fundamentals

    CPaaS — Communications Platform as a Service

    CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service) is the API and platform layer that lets a business add voice calling, SMS and MMS, WhatsApp, RCS, email, and video into its own application without building or running carrier infrastructure itself. Instead of negotiating separate carrier contracts and operating switches per channel, a team integrates one provider's API and pays for what it sends, receives, or connects, while the provider handles routing, carrier relationships, and compliance underneath.

  • Email deliverability

    Deliverability score

    A deliverability score is a single number, usually 0-100, that estimates how likely an email is to reach its recipient's inbox. It is calculated from a mix of signals — message content (spam-trigger keywords, shortened links, excessive punctuation), the sending domain's or IP's current reputation, and that sender's recent bounce and spam-complaint rates — so a sender can flag and fix a message likely to be filtered or routed to spam before a campaign goes out.

  • Billing & spend control

    Spend Velocity Anomaly — wallet spend forensics

    A spend velocity anomaly is a sudden surge in an account's wallet spend rate — for example SMS, voice, WhatsApp, or AI-agent usage projecting many times its trailing daily-average baseline — that signals either a broken campaign loop or fraud such as traffic pumping or toll fraud. A platform that tracks spend velocity per channel can flag the surge, alert the account owner, and throttle the affected channel before the daily cap is hit, instead of the abuse showing up only on the end-of-month invoice.

  • Platform fundamentals

    PaaS — Platform as a Service

    PaaS (Platform as a Service) is the cloud model where a provider runs the underlying infrastructure — servers, network, and a managed runtime — so a team can build and run applications on top of it instead of operating that infrastructure itself. In communications, the common PaaS variants specialize by domain: CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service) exposes voice, messaging, and video as APIs; CCaaS covers contact centers as a finished agent-facing application; and UCaaS covers a company's internal phone system.

  • Voice infrastructure

    BYOC — Bring your own carrier

    BYOC (bring your own carrier) is the arrangement where a company keeps its own telecom carrier — and the rates, numbers, and routing agreements that come with it — while using a communications platform for the application layer: IVR, call queues, messaging flows, and reporting. The platform connects to the customer's existing carrier over SIP or SMPP instead of replacing it entirely, so the company keeps the carrier relationship it already has.

  • Compliance & consent

    Reassigned Numbers Database — RND

    The Reassigned Numbers Database (RND) is the FCC's centralized registry for checking whether a US phone number has been reassigned to a new subscriber since a business originally captured consent for it. Before placing a call or sending a text, a sender submits the number together with the date consent was captured and receives back a verdict — yes, no, or no_data — that tells it whether the consent it holds still belongs to the person now on that number.

  • Compliance & consent

    DNC — Do-Not-Call

    A Do-Not-Call (DNC) registry is a government-run or carrier-run list of phone numbers whose owners have opted out of receiving unsolicited marketing calls. In markets that operate one — the US National DNC Registry, the UK's Telephone Preference Service (TPS/CTPS), and equivalents elsewhere — a business must scrub its outbound campaigns against that list before dialing, and registrations stay active for a defined period (31 days in the US refresh cycle) that the scrub has to respect.

  • Compliance & consent

    Mini-TCPA — State Telephone Consumer Protection laws

    Mini-TCPA is the informal label for state-level telephone-marketing laws — Florida's FTSA and equivalents in Oklahoma, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and West Virginia among them — that sit on top of the federal TCPA and impose stricter rules than it does: narrower consent scopes, private rights of action for individual consumers, tighter time-of-day windows, and in several states bans on sales marketing on Sundays. A sender calling nationally is governed by whichever applicable regime is the strictest, not by the federal floor alone.

  • Compliance & consent

    DSAR — Data Subject Access Request

    A Data Subject Access Request (DSAR) is the formal mechanism a person uses to exercise rights over the personal data a business holds about them — access, deletion, correction, portability, or opt-out-of-sale, depending on the applicable privacy law. Privacy laws give the business a hard deadline to respond; GDPR requires 30 calendar days (extendable once), and CCPA/CPRA, which define broader access, deletion, portability, and opt-out-of-sale rights, set the deadline at 45 days from the date it receives the request.

  • Compliance & consent

    Attestation level — STIR/SHAKEN attestation tiers

    Attestation level is the three-letter grade (A, B, or C) the originating carrier stamps onto every outbound STIR/SHAKEN call to declare how thoroughly it verified the caller. A (full attestation) means the carrier authenticated the caller and confirmed its right to use the caller-ID it presented. B (partial attestation) means the carrier knows who the caller is but cannot confirm it owns the caller-ID. C (gateway attestation) means the call entered the network from a source the carrier cannot verify, so only the gateway path is known.

  • Compliance & consent

    KYC — Know Your Customer

    KYC (Know Your Customer) is the mandatory identity verification a carrier or regulator applies before it activates a phone number, approves a Sender ID, or expands a sender's throughput in a regulated market. The requesting business supplies a document bundle — a verified legal identity, a tax or company registry entry, beneficial-owner structure, and proof of operating address — and continually renews it as documents age out, because many jurisdictions block traffic for entities whose KYC no longer matches the current record.

  • Compliance & consent

    Suppression list

    A suppression list is the set of addresses — phone numbers, email addresses, or channel-specific IDs — a business has resolved should never receive another message from it, whether because the recipient opted out (STOP), the address landed on a do-not-call registry, or a per-tenant policy gate applies regardless of the recipient's own opt-in. The platform treats the list as a hard send-gate: any suppressed destination in a campaign, contact import, or API dispatch drops before delivery.

  • Compliance & consent

    HIPAA — Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act

    HIPAA is the US federal law (45 CFR Part 164, especially the Security Rule at §164.302 and the Privacy Rule) that governs how protected health information is created, stored, and transmitted. On a CPaaS platform it binds the moment a healthcare tenant sends any message, call, or fax that contains patient information: the platform is a business associate, the tenant is a covered entity, and both owe protected health information (PHI) the access, encryption, retention, and audit controls the Security Rule lists.

  • Voice infrastructure

    Virtual Phone Number

    A virtual phone number is a cloud-based phone number that is not tied to a fixed physical line or device. Because it lives in the cloud, it can be provisioned instantly from an API and its inbound calls, texts, or faxes get routed over the internet to whichever destination, SIP trunk, or application the owner configures — rather than ringing a specific handset wired to a copper line at one address.

  • Contact center (voice)

    Call routing

    Call routing is the process of directing an incoming phone call to the right queue, agent, department, or destination based on a set of criteria — such as the caller's number, the menu option they pressed, the time of day, or the skills required to handle their request. Instead of every call landing on a single line or ring group, a routing engine evaluates each call against configured rules and sends it to the destination most likely to resolve it, which is what keeps wait times down and first-contact resolution up as call volume grows.

  • Messaging compliance

    Number warm-up

    Number warm-up (also called sender registration warm-up or 10DLC warm-up) is the gradual ramp of message or call volume on a newly registered sender — a fresh 10DLC long code, short code, or alphanumeric sender ID — instead of sending at full volume from day one. Carriers have no delivery history to judge a brand-new sender by, so traffic is gated by a daily cap that rises along a growth curve until the number graduates as warmed, earning carrier trust instead of triggering spam-style filtering.

  • Voice infrastructure

    Network edge

    The network edge is the boundary where a private or local network interfaces with the public Internet — the point where traffic crosses from infrastructure you control onto infrastructure you don't. In VoIP, it's where an SBC (Session Border Controller) sits to secure, normalize, and police SIP signaling and media as calls pass between a business network and a carrier, and where NAT traversal happens so real-time media can route reliably.

  • Messaging infrastructure

    Virtual SMS

    Virtual SMS is sending and receiving text messages over the internet using a virtual phone number — a cloud-based number not tied to a physical handset or SIM card — instead of a mobile device on a carrier network. Applications use it to run two-way SMS programmatically from software: provisioning a number, sending outbound texts, and receiving inbound replies as structured framework events rather than on a phone.

  • Email deliverability

    Open rate

    Open rate is the percentage of successfully delivered messages that recipients actually open, calculated by dividing unique opens by delivered messages. It is a core engagement metric for email and messaging programs: a high bounce or complaint rate hurts future deliverability, but a low open rate is often the earlier signal that subject lines, targeting, or send timing are missing the audience.

  • Contact center (CCaaS)

    Net Promoter Score (NPS) — Net Promoter Score

    Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures how likely customers are to recommend a business to others. It comes from a single survey question — 'How likely are you to recommend us?' answered on a 0-10 scale — and is calculated as the percentage of promoters (scores 9-10) minus the percentage of detractors (scores 0-6), producing a value from -100 to +100. Unlike CSAT, which scores one specific interaction, NPS tracks the customer's overall relationship with the brand.

  • Trust & safety

    Blocklist

    A blocklist is the set of destinations or categories a sending platform permanently refuses to deliver to — phone numbers, email addresses, recipient domains, or abusive sending patterns. Entries that never move are enforced as a hard send-time gate: any outbound message aimed at a blocklisted destination is dropped before dispatch, so no campaign, import, or API call can reach it. A blocklist answers the opposite question of an allowlist: deny by default, not permit by default.

  • Trust & safety

    Allowlist

    An allowlist is the set of destinations or categories a sending platform explicitly approves to receive messages — phone numbers, email addresses, recipient domains, or sender-provided consent attestations. Where a blocklist denies by default, an allowlist permits by default: when an allowlist is active, any destination not on it is blocked before dispatch. The pairing matters because compliance definitions care about which direction the default runs.

  • Email deliverability

    Preheader

    A preheader (also called preview text) is the short line that follows an email's subject line in the inbox listing, pulled by Gmail, Apple Mail, or Outlook from a hidden block at the top of the message. Because subject, sender name, and preheader are the three fields a recipient scans before deciding to open, marketing teams write preview text intentionally instead of letting the inbox clip the first line of body copy.

  • Messaging use cases

    Autoresponder

    An autoresponder is a messaging flow that replies automatically to an inbound message — an SMS keyword like JOIN or HELP, a WhatsApp opt-in, or an email — without a human answering it. The reply goes on the same channel, commonly to confirm an opt-in, deliver a keyword-triggered coupon or link, or honor the STOP/HELP handling SMS campaigns require. On Orbit, the flow runs over web events: a route matches the keyword, and the reply is sent.