Pakistan (Middle-East) Phone Verification Services and Mobile Phone Carriers
In each country there are multiple phone carriers. Pakistan (Middle-East) has 6 major ones:
- Mobilink
- Zong/CMPak Limited
- Telenor
- Ufone
- Warid
- SCO
NOTE: In November 2015, Mobilink, and Warid merged to become Jazz.
For phone verification, a web service needs to send SMS and voice OTP (also known as one-time PIN) by communicating with a SMS/voice gateway, which sits astride the Internet and phone infrastructure. There are many phone verification services. The major global ones are Twilio, Infobip, Nexmo, MessageBird, etc., and there are regional ones like Cequens, Plivo, Tropo, etc.
Goal of Pakistan (Middle-East) Phone Verification Service Comparison Report
Our previous
research shows that using a single phone verification service never gives you the optimum SMS/voice OTP deliverability globally since each service, depending on their complex partnerships with phone carriers in each region, etc., will excel in in some regions/carriers, while falling short in others.
In this study, we:
- Test more phone verification services
- Focus on reliability measurements at country-level
This enables us to offer more insights about phone verification OTP (SMS & Voice) delivery:
- How important is choosing a single phone verification service that delivers OTP?
- What is the drop in OTP reliability if we wrongly choose a poor phone verification service?
- Does using 2 or more services improve OTP reliability?
- You send an OTP re-request or auto-send an unconverted OTP through the 2nd service to improve delivery
We use Conversion Rate (number of requested OTP used/total number of requested OTP) as a yardstick to measure the reliability of SMS/voice OTP deliverability of each service for each carrier.
Caveat Emptor: Conversion Rate is a good indicator of reliable OTP deliverability, and it represents the lower bound of reliability. Actual reliability is higher as conversion rate can be affected by users who wrongly request for OTP when they do not need it, or users who change their mind about proceeding with the service/transaction after requesting for OTP.
You can skip straight to the comparison summary section near the end to get quick answers.
Conversion Rate Data Measurements for Service/Carriers in Pakistan (Middle-East)
The table below shows how each service (anonymized as P1 - P5) fare in terms of conversion rate for each Pakistan (Middle-East) carrier. This data is used to answer the questions asked.
Table 1: Service-Carrier OTP Conversion Rate Measurements
How important is choosing a single phone verification service in Paksitan (Middle-East)?
Table 2: Reliability and Sensitivity of Each Service in Pakistan (Middle-East)
Details
From Table 1, we can look at the data for each service to derive Table 2:
- Min: The worst conversion rate of the service across all carriers
- Max: The best conversion rate of the service across all carriers
- Ave: The average of conversion rate across all carriers for the service
- Sensitivity: The difference between Min and Max
- Reliability: Average conversion rate but color-coded to help readability
Conclusion
We look at Reliability and Sensitivity.
From Table 2:
- The best service is P5, which gives you average Reliability of 76.0% and Sensitivity of around 3.88%
- The low sensitivity means P1 can deliver reliably across all carriers
- The worst service is P4, which gives you Reliability of 61.50% and Sensitivity of around 63.34%
- The ridiculously high sensitivity means P4 has reliability that varies widely across all carriers
Thus in Pakistan (Middle-East), if you do not have phone verification service reliability data, you can pick an outright poor service, which results in bad user experience, and major loss of potential & existing users; there is a 15% difference in OTP reliability (between the worst and best OTP provider)
Does using multiple phone verification services improve reliability of OTP deliverability in Pakistan (Middle-East)?
Theoretically, we can combine 2 services to improve the conversion rate. This is a combinatorial problem, which there are 10 possible combinations.
Table 3a: Reliability and Sensitivity of Each 2-Service Combination in Pakistan (Middle-East)
Similarly, we can combine 3 services to improve the conversion rate. As there are a lot of combinations, we can do this heuristically by we choosing 3 services that has best delivery for at least 2 of the 5 carriers.
Table 3b: Reliability and Sensitivity of Each 3-Service Combination in Pakistan (Middle-East)
From Table 1, we can combine the conversion rate for each 2 and 3-service combination to derive Table 3a and 3b:
- Min: The worst conversion rate of the 2/3 service across all carriers
- Max: The best conversion rate of the 2/3 service across all carriers
- Ave: The average of conversion rate across all carriers for the 2/3 services
- Sensitivity: The difference between Min and Max
- Reliability: Average conversion rate but color-coded to help readability
Conclusion
The effect of using a 2-service combination, is very obvious; the average Reliability across any 1-service is 71.84% (from Table 2 but calculation not shown) jumps to 77.13% (from Table 3a but calculation not shown) when any 2-service combination is employed.
The Sensitivity of any 2-service provide across 5 carriers is also less, i.e., OTP deliverability is more stable across carriers; the Sensitivity average & variance for 1-service combination is 24.11% and 0.059, compared to that of a 2-service combination 6.12% and 0.0012.
By selecting the best service (Table 2), the best 2-service combination (Table 3a), and deriving the measurements for 3-service combination (Table 3b), we create a Strategy table (Table 4) as shown:
Table 4: Comparing Strategy of Using 1, 2, and 3 Services To Improve OTP Deliverability In Pakistan (Middle-East)
Two-service and three-service combination is superior to one-service average Reliability by more than (77.13% - 71.84%) = %5.29, and reduces average Sensitivity by more than (24.11 - 6.12) = 17.99%.
Comparison Summary For Voice & SMS Verification Service Reliability in Pakistan (Middle East)
Let us answer the questions posed about phone verification service in Pakistan (Middle-East):
- How important is my choice when choosing to use a single phone verification service?
- Extremely important because the OTP reliability varies drastically across phone verification services
- What is the drop in OTP reliability if we choose a poor phone verification service?
- The drop is approximately (76% - 61%) = 15%. The poorest service has average reliability < 61% compared to the best service, which has average reliability > 76% (see Table 2)
- Does using 2 or more phone verification services help improve OTP reliability?
- Yes. Using 2 services improves average reliability by 5.29%. Using 3 services offer minimal additional reliability gains
In Pakistan (Middle-East), there are more phone verification services that has poor reliability across carriers because the phone infrastructure is less mature, and it is difficult for a phone verification service to be reliable across a large number of carriers. Thus choosing this right phone verification service is really crucial. In other words, don’t risk choosing a wrong phone verification service, use RingCaptcha because we know the best phone verification service/carrier combination for Pakistan (Middle-East).
Best Practices of Using Multiple Phone Verification Service
For best practice, always use at least 2 services so that you can send a re-request for OTP, or auto-send an unconverted OTP through a fallback service. This is seldom done in practice because:
- You have to maintain relationship with at least 2 different phone verification services
- You have to write & maintain code for 2 different set of APIs
- You have to continually test to ensure that fallback works
With RingCaptcha, you only maintain a single relationship with our SMS/voice OTP provider marketplace, develop for a single API, and you are never locked-in to any specific phone verification service. What is more we build in all these OTP fallback features plus fraud mitigation features so you don’t have to - you just make a single API call to send OTP, and everything else magically happens in RingCaptcha.
Interested to boost your business with better transactional and notification SMS deliverability, we can make it happen. Talk to an expert now.
