| Country | Alphanumeric | Regime | Notes |
|---|
Why sender-ID rules differ so much by country
Alphanumeric sender IDs — a text name like MYBRAND instead of a phone number — look like a small cosmetic choice, but the rules around them split into three real regimes. Some countries let any sender pick a name with no central registry (most of Western Europe). Others require pre-registration tied to a real business before a name is allowed to send at all (Turkey's İYS, India's DLT, the UAE and Saudi Arabia's operator registration, Nigeria's NCC registry). A few effectively don't support alphanumeric sending on the terminating side no matter what you register (the US, Canada, Japan) — carriers there route by number, not name.
Getting this wrong doesn't just mean a rejected API call. Unregistered alphanumeric traffic into a pre-registration market is commonly silently filtered, mislabeled as spam, or delivered with the sender overridden to a generic short code — which is worse than an error, because nothing tells you it happened. This table only includes countries where the rule is well-documented from a regulator or established carrier practice; markets with unclear or fast-changing requirements were left out rather than guessed at. It's a starting point for the destination's real registration process, not a substitute for it — the deeper sender-ID rules article goes further per market.