United Arab Emirates (AE)

Locale name

United Arab Emirates

ISO code
The International Organization for Standardization two character representation for the given locale.

AE

Region

Middle East & Africa

Mobile country code
A three digit code associated with the given locale and used in conjunction with a Mobile Network Code to uniquely identify mobile networks.

424

Dialing code
The dialing prefix used to establish a call or send an SMS from one locale to the given locale.

+971

Two-way SMS supported
Whether Twilio supports two-way SMS in the given locale.

No

Twilio concatenated message support
Concatenation refers to the capability of splitting a message that is too long to be sent in one SMS into smaller pieces and then joining the pieces at the receiving end so that the receiver sees the message as one. 

Yes

Message length
How many characters can be sent given a particular message encoding before the message will be split into concatenated segments.

160 Characters

Twilio MMS support
Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) provides a standards-based means to send pictures and video to mobile phones.

Converted to SMS with embedded URL

Sending SMS to landline numbers
How Twilio handles an SMS message destined for landline telephone number.

You cannot send SMS to a landline destination number: the Twilio REST API will throw a 400 response with error code 21614, the message will not appear in the logs, and the account will not be charged.

Compliance considerations
Twilio strongly encourages customers to review proposed use cases with qualified legal counsel to make sure that they comply with all applicable laws. This table lists some general best practices.

Carriers in the United Arab Emirates are heavily filtering SMS traffic, so Twilio recommends pre-registering an Alphanumeric Sender ID to improve delivery. Unregistered Sender IDs will be replaced with generic Alphanumeric Sender IDs and may be blocked by carriers.

All promotional Alphanumeric Sender IDs must carry an AD- prefix, and this counts towards the 11-character limit. Promotional messages to the UAE can not be sent between 09:00pm to 07:00am local time. Messages sent during the restricted time period will be queued outside the Twilio platform and will only be processed for delivery during the allowed time period.

Twilio strongly encourages customers to review proposed use cases with qualified legal counsel to make sure that they comply with all applicable laws. The following are some general best practices:

1. Get opt-in consent from each end-user before sending any communication to them, particularly for marketing or other non-essential communications.
2. Only communicate during an end-user’s daytime hours unless it is urgent.
3. SMS campaigns should support HELP/STOP messages, and similar messages, in the end-user’s local language.
4. Do not contact end-users on do-not-call or do-not-disturb registries.

Operator network capability
Whether mobile operators in the given country support the feature.

Required

Not Supported

Twilio supported
Whether Twilio supports the feature for the given country.

Required
Learn more

Not Supported

Sender ID preserved
In some countries sender IDs for certain sender types are not preserved and are changed for compliance and/or deliverability reasons. In these countries mobile subscribers will see a different ‘from sender ID’ than the one sent by you.

Yes

No

Provisioning time
Provisioning is the process of getting the sender ID approved and registered with mobile networks (depending on country requirements). Provisioning time is how long this process takes in the given country.

2 weeks

N/A

UCS-2 support

Supported

N/A

Use case restrictions

Messages containing adult, gambling, or religious content are strictly forbidden. All promotional Alphanumeric Sender IDs must carry an AD- prefix. Promotional messages to the UAE can not be sent between 09:00pm to 07:00am local time. Messages sent during the restricted time period will be queued outside the Twilio platform and will only be processed for delivery during the allowed time period.

URL shortners should be avoided as the local networks tend to filter messages containing them. 

Please note that Promotional messaging is only supported for Domestic Entities and Promotional Content is not permitted for International Entities.

Alphanumeric Sender IDs are only supported through pre-registration.

Best practices

For all health services related Sender ID registration requests, we will require an approval letter from the UAE health authorities.

UAE is a country very sensitive to URLs. Even if the Sender ID gets registered, sending messages containing a URL that is not checked and allowlisted may produce issues in the delivery so we would like to suggest our customers to proactively provide us with the full list of ULRs they intend to use during Sender ID Registration procedure as sample SMS messages.

Due to limitations related to the local infrastructure we suggest our clients to use UCS2 encoding when submitting messages containing the EURO symbol "€"

N/A

Operator network capability
Whether mobile operators in the given country support the feature.

Not Supported

Not Supported

Not Supported

Twilio supported
Whether Twilio supports the feature for the given country.

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Not Supported

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Sender ID preserved
In some countries sender IDs for certain sender types are not preserved and are changed for compliance and/or deliverability reasons. In these countries mobile subscribers will see a different ‘from sender ID’ than the one sent by you.

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No

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Provisioning time
Provisioning is the process of getting the sender ID approved and registered with mobile networks (depending on country requirements). Provisioning time is how long this process takes in the given country.

N/A

N/A

N/A

UCS-2 support

N/A

Supported

N/A

Use case restrictions

N/A

Numeric Sender IDs will be overwritten with generic Alphanumeric Sender IDs outside the Twilio platform and may be blocked by the operators. 

N/A

Best practices

N/A

The UAE Telecoms Regulatory Authority requires the pre-registration of all customers sending to the UAE.

N/A