Vietnam unfortunately blocks all foreign SMS providers like any other communist country would. The only way to send SMS’s to Vietnam mobile numbers is through local Vietnamese SMS providers. Although I do not have any problems with this in principle in reality is sub-optimal because businesses are forced to use local providers regardless whether the service is reliable or not. Because the Vietnamese government protects these local SMS providers and creates this anti-competitive environment customers end up paying prices that are about 10 times higher than comparable international providers and moreover the service and customer support are always invariably terrible.

FiboSms (fibo.vn) is one example of this. Their service is offline at least 10-15 times a month and they don’t do anything about it. We setup a monitoring system that pings their service and we find that their service is always offline.

Customer service with Fibo is non-existent; we have tried for almost half a year to tell them of their unprofessional service but have not seen any improvements at all. Constant outage and yet they will charge ridiculous fees every month.

My only advice to anyone looking for SMS providers in Vietnam is DO NOT USE FIBO.