Send SMS to Germany
from $0.0210/msg

A § 7 UWG-valid double opt-in has three artifacts: (1) the original consent request (a form submission, checkbox event, or explicit keyword reply) timestamped and logged with IP and user agent; (2) a confirmation request sent to the channel being subscribed (for SMS, this should be an SMS round-trip to the number itself, not an email); (3) the verified confirmation reply event, timestamped. If any of the three is missing, German courts treat the consent as invalid. The leading BGH authority is the 2011 Telefonaktion II / Double-Opt-In decision (I ZR 164/09, 10 Feb 2011), which held that an email-based double-opt-in is insufficient to prove consent for telephone advertising — the email addressee may not be the phone subscriber. The CJEU's Planet49 ruling (C-673/17) reinforces that pre-ticked boxes and bundled consents fail under Art. 4(11) GDPR.

No. § 7 UWG specifically targets unzumutbare Belästigung — unreasonable nuisance — from advertising communications. One-time passwords, two-factor codes, delivery notifications, fraud alerts, appointment reminders, and password resets are transactional and fall under the implied consent created by the underlying account relationship. The test is whether a reasonable recipient would consider the SMS advertising (werbung) or service communication (Dienstleistungskommunikation). Do not piggyback marketing content onto transactional SMS — BGH case law treats a single promotional sentence inside an OTP as a § 7 UWG violation.

§ 7 UWG itself creates a civil claim rather than an administrative fine, so enforcement runs through Abmahnungen (cease-and-desist letters) from competitor lawyers or the Verbraucherzentralen. A typical Abmahnung for a single unsolicited marketing SMS carries a reimbursable legal-fee award of EUR 600-1500 per send under § 13a UWG, plus a contractual penalty clause typically set at EUR 2500-5100 per repeat violation. Parallel GDPR fines under Art. 83 sit on top — the state DPAs (LfDI) and the BfDI have issued six-to-seven-figure GDPR fines against telcos and large B2C senders since 2019, with the BfDI's EUR 9.55 million 1&1 Telecom fine (Dec 2019) and the EUR 45 million Vodafone fine (2025) among the most visible. Case-specific fines are published on the EDPB national-news feed.

No. The German implementation of the ePrivacy regime (§ 7 UWG plus Art. 13 ePrivacy Directive) treats electronic marketing as a lex specialis that requires active consent regardless of whether a separate GDPR Art. 6 basis exists. The one exception is § 7 Abs. 3 UWG: if you collected the email address (not phone number — specifically email) during the sale of goods or services, you may use it for direct advertising of similar products unless the customer has objected. This does not extend to SMS in most German court interpretations.

Both apply, and they stack rather than preempt. § 7 UWG binds on the destination: Germany is where the handset rings, so UWG's double-opt-in and consent-logging obligations apply regardless of where the sending company is incorporated or where the CRM runs. The TCPA binds on the sender: if you are a US-based entity, the TCPA's restrictions on automated calling/texting of US numbers are already part of your compliance baseline, and the TCPA's called-party framing extends to texts you originate — but its substantive restrictions are on US-number recipients, not on German ones. Practical rule: when the recipient is German, § 7 UWG is the stricter regime (double opt-in, three-artifact audit trail, two-year staleness test) and satisfies TCPA's express-consent requirement for the US-number analog as a byproduct. Comply with UWG for German sends and you are automatically above the TCPA floor for those specific sends; the reverse is not true. Keep your US-only and German-only consent records separable in your CRM — if a German regulator asks for the three-artifact trail on a specific recipient, the TCPA-sufficient log alone will not answer the question. Consult German counsel for any cross-border marketing flow; enforcement is real and case law continues to tighten.

Yes. German operators (Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, O2, 1&1) accept alphanumeric sender IDs up to 11 characters, Latin alphabet, no spaces. There is no pre-registration requirement with BNetzA for commercial senders, but Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone increasingly rewrite unregistered IDs to a generic long code on A2P traffic flagged by their spam filters. Register your sender ID with smsroute in advance to avoid this.

Median delivery from API submission to handset is 142 milliseconds measured at our Frankfurt POP. The 95th percentile is 310 ms. Germany has the lowest median latency on our European cluster because we interconnect directly with Deutsche Telekom via a Frankfurt peering link and with Vodafone Germany via the DE-CIX exchange. Delays above 30 seconds indicate handset-off or out-of-coverage; operators buffer and retry for 48 hours.

No. smsroute is a transit provider and does not inspect or validate your consent records. You are the controller under GDPR Art. 4(7) and the sender under § 7 UWG — the opt-in evidence (the original consent event, the confirmation-request SMS, and the confirmation reply) must live in your own CRM or consent-management platform. If a recipient files an Abmahnung, you will be asked to produce the three-artifact trail with timestamps and IPs. smsroute provides delivery-receipt logs that help you demonstrate you sent only to numbers in your consent system, but the underlying consent record is yours to keep.