Hacker News Reader

Comment by ahmgeek | Hacker News Reader

Ask me anything related to the technology/revenue and whatnot...

On the first page, there's the claim:

  Encrypted Calls
  
  All calls are encrypted with TLS 1.2+ for signaling and SRTP with AES-128 for audio. Your conversations stay private during transmission.

This can only be true on your (Voklit) end between the client and the server, it stops being encrypted both from signalling and audio perspective the moment it hits the PSTN in any country on any network.

I would consider re-phrasing this so that limitation is more clear, for people who may misinterpret that encryption claim, unless you've found a way to encrypt PSTN signalling and audio which would be a much more impressive feat.

You are right, I will change that now so I don't mislead users.

Thanks for flagging this.

Could you display the rate in local currencies or at least show the actual currency in ISO ?

I'm guessing that the price in $ is USD but as we also have $ in Canada, it can be misleading, especially when 1USD~=1.35CAD

Of course, nice suggestion, on it <3

And done, you're quick !

mad hugs

Extraordinary! Congratulations. I’ve always been fascinated by the world of telephony. How did you manage to get numbers for every country? Do you have direct access to SS7, are you a virtual operator, or do you use third-party services for each country?

Usually, you need a presence in each country, like an official entity. It's easy for a myriad of countries to do that for a fee; even in Dubai, you can form a company. Then you can acquire numbers easily in these countries. I am now supporting the UK (easy to get)/US/CA, and will soon support some European countries as well. What's hard are the countries that require authority talks like Egypt :D

I am Egyptian living in Europe, so I want to support it, but I left it for a bit.

There are a lot of telephony providers out there (Twilio, Bandwidth, etc.) So it's easy to start building.

He just uses Twilio, they handle everything, he just calls some APIs and takes a 257% markup for phone calls. Anyone can sign up, usually at most you'll need a local address.

I have no clue where you came up with these assumptions and the arbitrary markup.

Are you saying I'm wrong?

1. your privacy policy

> Third Parties

> - Twilio: Calls, SMS, phone numbers

2. your pricing and twilio's pricing

Twilio: $0.0140 / min

You: $0.05 / min

(0.05 - 0.0140) / 0.0140 * 100 = 257%

Thanks for pointing out the outdated content, we don't use twilio, we use telnyx.

our markup is mere 30% not 257%.

thanks for the checks up tho :)

Do scammers still try to get "local-seeming" numbers? Any mechanisms to prevent them registering, using stolen credit card numbers?

I have monitoring in place for such behaviour, also detection for too many calls under specific amount of time with locations. I am still very new to actually have scamers finding the website I think.

Scammers have ways to spoof numbers. I doubt they will bother buying numbers unless they can get a bunch of them.

Are these voip numbers or real phone numbers? Can they be used to receive 2FA codes?

Assuming you are talking about a US Number. Most likely, even if the number you get is not classified as voip today, there's a good chance it will be classified as such in the future. (I've had numbers that I ported to google voice from cell phone that eventually started being classified as a voip #).

Cheapest reliable (as in 100%, GV works ok for me in general, but not perfect) way I've found in my research of this is to get a Tello Mobile #, as they are just a t-mobile MVNO, so the numbers are part of t-mobile's pool, so that costs $5-6 a month at the minimum, depending how you configure it.).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com