Throttling

Throttling is a technical term that means restricting the flow of messages. While this may sound like a bad thing, it helps ensure everyone’s messages are sent without excessive delay. It also lets you control the timing of your messages, which can be important when you are expecting a large response.

For example, your travel company sends out an offer with instructions to call the office to book a special price deal. You expect about a 10% response and send out 1000 messages. If you sent all the messages out at one time, you could potentially get 100 phone calls within minutes.

If you have a small office with just a few travel agents, this could quickly overwhelm you. But if you schedule it to deliver a hundred messages every hour or two, this throttles the response down to something more manageable.

In NetMessenger, when you send to a distribution list or a high volume of messages, you can specify the period you want to throttle the messages. You can select how many to send at one time, and how often you want them to be sent. For example, you can send 100 per hour or 10 every minute.

In addition to the throttling you can set when you send messages, there is automatic throttling done by the SMS gateways and networks. This prevents their systems from being overloaded by a flood of messages. Even with this “built-in” throttling, messages still arrive within seconds.

Different countries may also have regulations or guidelines on how frequently messages can be sent. In the US for instance, if too many messages are sent per second, those messages are automatically flagged as spam and blocked at the network level. Because of this, different countries may require different throttling settings.