Twilio ramps up mobile play with programmable SIMs for IoT, handsets with T-Mo | Hacker News Reader

Twilio ramps up mobile play with programmable SIMs for IoT, handsets with T-Mo

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101 pointscoloneltcb36 comments

Is anyone else thinking of porting their mobile number to Twilio and setting up their own, personalized google voice using the twilio API ?

This occurred to me when I decided that what I wanted my phone to do was ring forever if I didn't answer. It turns out, twilio gives you a way to do this:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22410430/twilio-respond-t...

... and there are a lot of other very interesting things you could do:

https://www.twilio.com/blog/2013/03/building-beyond-google-v...

Used to work at Twilio and definitely had this thought a lot. It's harder than it seems, at least to make it reliable.

Inbound forwarding is easy. Setting caller ID on outbound is where it gets hard in terms of user experience.

So I've actually been doing this in various forms for the past few years. Mind you I actually chose to go with Plivo (a competitor) instead of Twilio, a decision I'm still thinking about to this day (MMS primarily). The way it works for me is I actually use Slack as the interface to my contacts. Each person is their own private slack room. I use it just like any other, I send them slack messages and it sends them a SMS and vice-versa. So far it's been pretty great, I get to take advantage of all of Slack's clients and I just write the code that transits the messages using the Slack API. What's really fun is that I'm starting to allow slash commands so that my friends can use some of them in the rooms with me and we can have sort of a shared chat-bot experience over regular SMS.

If anybody is interested in seeing the code, some parts of it are already open source[1]. The most interesting piece is the dialer, as someone in the thread pointed out, setting the caller ID on the outbound is tricky. On Android there are actually APIs that can intercept outbound calls, manipulate the number, and make the call to my gateway and then input the actual number as DTMF codes followed by a terminator. It doesn't always work but in 95% of cases I've never had a problem.

[1]: https://github.com/saarons/ward

This is a clever way to handle the client. I like it.

I'm doing this.

I initiated a port of my primary number a few weeks ago.

I'm not sure if what I'm building is exactly parallel to Google Voice but I believe it's similar. I'm in Canada so I can't get Google Voice. I rarely use my phone's voice or sms functionality so right now I'm just forwarding transcribed voicemails (with mp3 link) to email, and sms's to email as well (replying to an sms with an email that goes to sms is sort of fun). I'm also in the process of building out a simple app to handle this.

While testing, I've noticed the best part is now I'm not tempted to answer a call that most likely doesn't matter. I simply get a notification with an email. And I won't be paying for my voice or text plan which was about half the cost of my previous plan.

If anyone wants to use this you can email me at shawnp at gmail dot com.

Me. I'm about to travel around the world and I'd like my friends and family to still be able to contact me at my current number while I'm away. I'll be getting prepaid SIMs and presumably a new number wherever I go. Twilio should allow me to forward just calls from a whitelist (telemarketers/scammers be damned) and only at certain times, since my timezone will be changing frequently.

Good timing for Pebble Core? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11762535

The pricing seems rather outrageous. Is it not fair to compare with, say, Google Fi at $10/gig?

Not exactly fair, since this is targeted at lower-usage IoT/sensor use-cases where the difference in price between sending 1MB per day and 2MB per day is pennies.

At these prices, it doesn't make any sense to put it in your phone unless you really like Twilio.

Google Fi is a good deal, but what if you want just a little bit of cell data? Add in the ability to manage fleets of devices with an API. There is a service available now that sells SIMs for IoT applications:

http://neo.aeris.com/

with google fi you can also order extra data sim's with no monthly fee. And they use your phone's $10/gb plan.

This is what I do. It's basically free.

You can get a bucket of data to use across multiple data devices with Google Fi?

The price per megabyte is high but the price per SIM card per month is very reasonable. Twilio has never competed on price, it's competed on being the absolute easiest service to integrate with the rest of your infrastructure.

Looks like a good choice if you want a lot of nodes without Wi-Fi to report back a small stream of data each month.

Seems they should at least be pricing it the same as their smartphone pricing. $40 on T-mobile gets me 6GB of data with unlimited voice and SMS (and benefits like international roaming, zero-rated music services, etc), where under this plan it would get me 2GB of data, with no voice or SMS. I have friends in a large group plan who pay under $30/month for 10GB of data and all the other features.

The low bandwitdh pricing is very competitive with existing offerings, though.

sorry to be off topic, but what plan gets you 6GB with unlimited voice and sms for $40. Their website currently lists 3 Gb prepaid plan / unlimited for $40. The online only deal is 5 Gb , 100 minutes for $30.

I think it's if you opt out of the unlimited music streaming + data bank.

Fi is not $10/gig. It's $20+$10/gig. Which for anything IoT is incredibly expensive. There are cheaper options out there.

To be fair, pricing of Twillio has always been outrageous. Competitors are offering similar services for lower costs (for example Nexmo and Plivo).

Can second that, Plivo always had great pricing.

It's half the price of ting

https://ting.com/rates

Plug: if you're at the Clockwork Alchemy Steampunk Convention at the Doubletree Hotel in San Jose this weekend, check out the Telegraph Office.[1] That uses Twilio for SMS handling.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F_hhp4nCHE

I like the Telegraph Office idea, but the flashing in that video made my eyes hurt pretty quickly

I paste this in every time there's talk about cheap data SIMs for IoT stuff:

https://www.truphone.com/us/consumer/sim/

I'd love to hear other people's experiences, but basically: $0 a month per SIM, $0.09 per MB. Since there's no monthly fee, you're supposed to use a certain amount of credit per month or they'll charge you a small fee to keep your number active, but mine has been unused for maybe six months with zero charges still. The SIM costs $30, but half of that is service credit.

Any idea where/when we can get one?

Twilio says the service will be available broadly in Q4, 2016.

Programmable SIMs for the IoT?

Now we are definitely going to run out of phone numbers.

Does anyone else wonder whether or not the explosion of solar panel telemarketing calls are a consequence of how easy Twilio makes it to set up call center operations and change in and out of numbers?

Twilio requires that you call from either a number you have in their system, or a number you've verified ownership of. That's a higher bar than a lot of voip providers -- i've gotten many calls from numbers that don't even fit in the dialing plan.

From what I remember, you can change in and out of phone numbers like with Google voice - and there are a ton of them. I don't know if that matters for spammy calls - I don't know anything about that domain.

Twilio allows you to automate calls programmatically, and what a lot of the callers do is wait for you to say hello - they're robo dialers. I wonder how much Twilio has influenced that (unknowingly or deliberately)

I think those things were going on long before Twilio got in the game.

This is very easy and cheap to implement with Asterisk and a no-name VoIP provider. I've done some messing around with phones in the past and I would expect that Twilio has little/no effect on this space -- the barriers to being spammy with Twilio are higher than with Asterisk and another VoIP provider.

Not at all. There's dedicated dialer programs, and they use much, much, cheaper providers than Twilio. Dialer wholesale companies make around 10% if they're doing well. It's a very high volume business, and they are constantly on their feet since other providers will cut them off if their call acceptance and durations aren't high enough.

Telecom makes most "web scale" stuff look very small. Even a one-man operation might be doing 4000 calls a sec, each requiring about 20 packets, plus routing and billing lookups and records.

There are a lot of providers that do not check what the outbound caller-id is set as. The provider verifies that the server is allowed to send the traffic, that is all.

Telemarketers run thin margins and usually use cheaper providers than Twilio.

Telemarketers use anything BUT twilio for robocalling.

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