Due to strict spam monitoring and regulations on communications terminating to China, calls with short durations (under 3 minutes) have a high chance of being blocked. This is a universal behavior for all international traffic terminating to China, and is not something unique to Twilio’s platform.
To remain compliant with these regulations, access to China has been removed from the Geo-Permissions page. Going forward, enabling calls to China will require vetting before access is granted.
Enabling Voice Calls to China
If your calls have an average duration of over three minutes and you are interested in sending traffic to China, your use-case must be qualified to meet the following guidelines:
- No calls allowed with a duration shorter than 3 minutes
- No unsolicited marketing calls
- No high volume of repeated calls from the same origination (From) Number within a rolling hour
- No calls allowed from invalid, modified, spoofed or restricted origination (From) Numbers
- Calls must be sent from an international, non-China number when making calls to China
Please reach out to your Technical Account Manager or contact our Sales team to discuss further.
Notice: Callers not adhering to these rules may be at risk of blocking without notice. Spam monitoring in China happens downstream from Twilio, and Twilio has no control over this process. Call delivery to China will be made on a best-effort basis.
Unsupported Use Cases
Shorter contact use cases with calls averaging under three minutes (one-time passwords (OTPs), voice alerts, etc.) are incompatible with these new regulations. Customers with these unsupported use cases will not be able to place calls to China, but may be better served using Programmable Messaging for these communications. For the full details on enabling messages to China, and the local sending limitations, see China SMS Template Pre-approval Requests.
New Chinese Call Pricing Changes
Starting on February 28th, 2019, Twilio is implementing a minimum connection charge of two minutes for all voice calls to China. This means that any calls that are 119 seconds long or shorter will be charged for two minutes of call time by default. Calls that remain connected past 120 seconds will continue to be billed in one minute (60 second) increments.
For example, a call to China that is 3 minutes and 30 seconds in length would be billed at 4 minutes; the minimum connection charge for the first two minutes, and then 2 additional minutes (rounding up to the nearest minute).
For more information, please see our pricing sites: