Release notes

Effective September 19, 2023, Bandwidth is one of the first providers to expand the reachability of toll-free numbers in the Philippines to include 99% of the country’s telecom providers. Toll-free numbers are now reachable from Globe Telecom, in addition to PLDT and Smart.

This increased reachability has automatically been applied to all existing and newly purchased toll-free numbers with no additional cost. You can now remove any reachability restrictions or separate numbers that you or your customers may have in place specifically for Globe Telecom reachability. 

As of August 24, 2023, Zone Capacity alerts are now visible to all customers on the Alert page in Insights. When a new Zone is created, a Zone Capacity alert will automatically be added to the account. A threshold of 90% is automatically set for the alert, though customers can edit the Alert in the Alert dashboard to adjust the threshold as needed.

For more information on Alerts, check out our support article. 

Effective August 21, 2023, a new attestation metric will be available for France calls on our Voice Insights Metrics page. Attestation is used to determine a caller’s validity for using a specific number and can be used as a confidence indicator from the originating service provider to signal whether the party originating the call has the right to use the number. 

For more information, check out our support article.

Effective August 14, 2023, the E164 Pattern filter available on the Global Insights Metrics page has been updated; the name of the filter is now Numbers. Customers are able to search for any To and From number within their CDRs. 

To learn more, check out our support article.

On July 25, 2023, Bandwidth released a new Short Code Management feature in the Bandwidth Dashboard. 

Customers who choose to have Bandwidth manage their short code lease will be able to self-manage:

• The opportunity to select from various lease lengths (3, 6, or 12 months)
• Automatic lease renewal
• Subscribing to automatic notifications via email

We’re excited to share that we have made the Germany Emergency Services (ES) activation process faster! The emergency address activation time for single numbers has improved from five days to near-real time, and the emergency address activation time for number ranges and extensions is down to one business day!

You do not need to do anything to access this update; just continue to submit your ES requests via CSV file on the Global Portal as usual.

Our Real-Time Transcription feature is now available for converting speech-to-text during a live phone call using Bandwidth’s Voice API. Your application can request and receive the transcription to power use cases such as real-time captioning, capturing meeting notes, or triggering keyword-based logic.

For more information on Real-Time Transcription, check out our Start Transcription and Stop Transcription developer documentation.

Effective June 27, 2023, our international toll-free services are now available in Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. Toll-free numbers can be purchased directly through the global portal or by reaching out to your account manager.

Please note: The business end-user needs to follow the Special Ordering Process located in the Help Center. 

All customers with Global Voice Insights enabled can now access the Calls, Country, Zone, Capacity Group, and Usage Monitoring pages. These Insights allow you to monitor capacity usage by geography and date for a clear view of how to optimize your channel usage, as well as offering an end-to-end view of on-call performance and important metrics such as round trip time, packet loss, and jitter. 

To learn more about the Monitoring pages, visit our support page. 

Effective June 23, 2023, we are upgrading the IP interconnections in Belgium to further improve reliability, quality and redundancy. As part of this upgrade, Bandwidth is withdrawing support for legacy T.38 Fax.

If you use fax over IP services in Belgium, please ensure that your end devices have been configured to use G.711a for all fax transmissions. 

Effective June 12, 2023, nine new countries are available for Enhanced Voice Transit (EVT) which offers national and international outbound calling with a third party number. These countries are: Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, New Zealand, Slovakia and Slovenia. EVT is now offered in 32 countries.

If you already are contracted for EVT, these countries are available in the Global Portal today. To set up EVT, contact your Account Manager.

Effective May 31, 2023, a metric of Post Dial Delay, the time or delay that occurs from the time a number has been dialed until the caller or called party hears ringing, is available in our recently launched Voice Insights Call Logs. This new metric can help you investigate possible latency issues with calls and serve as an indicator of potential call quality issues.

For more information on Call Logs, check out our support article.

Effective May 31, 2023, Campaign ID is available in Message Logs. You can view the campaign associated with a given message and filter by Campaign ID, as well as change the timezone that data is displayed in and configure the fields available in the Message Logs table. 

For more information on Messaging Logs, check out our support article. 

Effective May 16, 2023, Bandwidth’s UCaaS Integration for Microsoft Teams has expanded coverage regions for Operator Connect into EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa). We now deliver connectivity in 33 countries globally with full PSTN replacement capabilities.

As of May 5, 2023, Bandwidth is supporting Emergency calls on Netherlands National (VOIP) numbers: +3185 and +3188.

You can enable emergency services on your national numbers via the Global Portal.

Bandwidth’s Programmable Voice API now offers Enhanced Text-to-Speech. This gives you the ability to incorporate more natural, humanlike voices in places like your IVR menu or outbound voice notifications to improve the customer experience. Enhanced Text-to-Speech offers a selection of six neural voices and is compatible with any of our supported languages.

Learn more about using the <SpeakSentence> BXML verb for converting text-to-speech.

Our Messaging Monitoring pages have been updated to include new configurations, filters, and functionality. Some of these key changes include:

• New Campaign ID, Location ID, and To and From Phone number filters (Usage and Delivery pages)
• Search from Today to 13 months ago (Usage and Delivery pages)
• Explore Delivery % by Carrier, Message Type, and Message Product 
• Monitor peak capacity for MMS and SMS traffic on the updated Capacity (formerly MPS) page

Effective May 8, 2023, Bandwidth has two new Voice Insights pages: Call Summaries and Connections. These pages will provide you with expanded visibility into voice usage and health. To learn more about these pages, check out our support article.

Please note: Users with the Account Admin or Reporting roles are enabled to access these pages. If you would like access, please contact your Admin to enable the Voice Insights role associated with your account.

Effective May 2, 2023, our international toll free services are now available in the following countries: Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Vietnam. 

Toll free numbers can be purchased directly through the global portal or by reaching out to your account manager. 

Bandwidth’s Programmable Voice API now supports the ability to auto-detect and transcribe speech in two additional languages: Spanish (Latin American) and French (Canadian). 

Learn more about transcribing a call here.