Teacher-texting service strikes a deal with Bell

Teacher-texting service 'Remind' strikes bargain with Bong

Services will even so be disrupted for Remind users who are subscribed to Rogers or its subsidiaries

Teacher-oriented messaging service Remind has struck a deal with Bell to continue offering its services in Canada.

"Nosotros're thrilled to share the news: Thanks to you, Bell Canada has informed us that they volition #ReverseTheFee. As a outcome, we can go on to offer Remind text notifications for everyone who has a phone plan with Bell or its subsidiaries," Remind said in an annunciation to its customers on January 25th.

Remind is a San Francisco-based two-way messaging service that is used past students, teachers, and parents. The service tin can be accessed through the company'south mobile app, spider web app, through email and via texting.

The service overall connects 31 million customers, many of whom are primarily based in the U.S. The company was founded in 2012. In 2014 Remind raised $65 million USD (roughly $85 million CAD) in venture funding to build out its platform further.

Remind'southward CEO Brian Grey said to MobileSyrup in an interview on January 11th that the service had plans to disable its texting functionality because of pushback from Rogers and Bong.

The ii carriers were planning to charge 25 times the price for Remind to access their networks.

Grey said students and teachers use the service to become essential letters about jitney cancellations, homework information, or gives teachers having the power to reach parents without using their personal phone numbers.

In Canada though, the service is costless, unlike in the U.S. where schools are able to use a special student package that delivers extra features apart from its free service.

This service was launched 2 years ago, and Grey said he hoped information technology would eventually brand its mode to Canada.

It'south important to notation that Remind uses a service called Twilio, a cloud communications platform that helps software developers to make and receive phone calls programmatically, send and receive text letters and perform other communications functions using its web services.

Twilio substantially sits between the carriers and companies to deliver these types of services. Twilio is likewise able to perform in Canada with the aid of Syniverse. Both Rogers and Bell work with Syniverse, an aggregator that operates inter-carrier text messaging.

At the time, Greyness said his company tried to strike a deal with Rogers but was unable to come to an understanding successfully.

Rogers, in a statement at the fourth dimension, said that information technology was aware of how of import these services were for parents and educators just it had "made every effort to piece of work out a more fair agreement with them that would have met their SMS needs on our network."

"Unfortunately, they were not satisfied," Rogers had said.

Remind'south proclamation noted though that text notifications volition even so be ending on January 28th for anyone with Rogers or its subsidiaries.

Source: Remind