DLT registration in India
In India, commercial SMS may only be sent by a registered sender using a registered header and a registered template. Those three registrations are made with the telecom operators, not inside Connect. Connect holds the registration data you have been granted so that messages can be composed against it; it cannot grant, accelerate or stand in for the registration itself, and it cannot send SMS on the live carrier in any case.
What DLT is, in one paragraph#
DLT is the registry Indian telecom operators run for commercial messaging. Rather than letting any sender push any text to any subscriber, the operators require the sending business to be registered as an entity, the sender identifier that appears on the handset to be registered as a header, and the wording of each message to be registered as a template. Traffic that does not match a registration is rejected by the operator, before any question of the recipient's preferences arises.
None of that is Connect's rule and none of it can be waived by a setting here. It is the reason a business can have a working provider, a working integration and still not be able to send a single message in India.
The three registrations#
- Entity registration
- The business itself, registered with the operator's DLT platform against its legal identity. Everything else hangs off this; without it there is nothing to attach a header to.
- Header registration
- The sender identifier a recipient sees instead of a phone number. Headers are registered per entity and are usually tied to the kind of traffic they carry — transactional messages and promotional messages are not interchangeable.
- Template registration
- The wording, with the variable parts marked. A message is matched against its template at send time by the operator, so text that drifts from what was registered is not delivered.
The order matters: entity, then header, then template. A business that writes its message copy first often finds it has to write it again, because a template is registered against a header that is registered against an entity, and the constraints flow downwards. Preparing for DLT, end to end is the sequence set out as a workflow, including what to gather before starting.
What Connect stores and what it does not#
| Part | Belongs to | What Connect does with it |
|---|---|---|
| Entity registration | The business, with the operators | Records that it exists; cannot obtain it |
| Header (sender ID) | The operators, granted to the entity | Stores the granted header for composing against |
| Templates | The operators, granted per header | Stores the registered wording and its variables |
| Consent and opt-out | The business, enforced here | Suppression and block:sms directives, checked at the send boundary |
| Actual delivery | The provider and the operator | Nothing on the live carrier, which carries no SMS |
What this means for a workspace outside India#
DLT is specific to Indian telecom regulation. A workspace sending elsewhere has no DLT step, but almost always has an equivalent set of local rules about sender identity, consent and content that live outside Connect in the same way. The general shape holds: the provider decides whether a message can physically be carried, the regulator decides whether it may be, and Connect enforces the part that is genuinely its own — who has asked not to be contacted.
It is worth restating the ceiling under all of this. Even a fully registered entity with approved headers and templates cannot send SMS through the carrier on the live account, because that carrier carries no SMS traffic. DLT readiness and provider capability are two separate conditions, and both are currently unmet for outbound text.
Questions#
Can Connect register my business on DLT?
No. Registration is an application a business makes to the telecom operators, with its own identity documents and its own review. Connect stores the result so that composing against an approved header and template is possible; it has no privileged route into that process and does not claim one.
Do I need DLT to receive SMS?
The registrations described here govern commercial sending. Receiving, deduplicating, attaching a message to a person and honouring an opt-out are the parts of the channel that work today, and they are not what DLT gates.
What happens if a message does not match its template?
The operator rejects it. That is why the registered wording is stored with its variable parts marked rather than as free text — a message assembled outside the template is not a message that arrives late, it is one that never arrives.