[HN Gopher] Twilio Super Sim - Public Beta
___________________________________________________________________
Twilio Super Sim - Public Beta
Author : samdung
Score : 178 points
Date : 2020-06-12 16:23 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.twilio.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.twilio.com)
| pheeney wrote:
| Could this be used as a sort of sporadic consumer phone service?
| For example signing up for services that require phone validation
| but want to protect your real phone for privacy. Activate the
| SIM, signup, verify, then deactivate. Repeat if they don't
| recognize your device or when you need to re-verify. After
| hardware costs you would be looking at $2/mo any time you needed
| it.
|
| Most other services I have looked at require a constant
| subscription. Or they are not a "real" number like google voice
| that can be detected and rejected. Or when you cancel and re-
| activate your previous phone number has changed so you can't re-
| verify without maintaining an active subscription. If the number
| is assigned to the sim then you can potentially rotate or have
| multiple numbers as well.
| gruez wrote:
| I suspect the phone numbers will still show up as a voip
| number, which is probably be an issue for sms validation.
| stqism wrote:
| This will be an issue, fraud prevention systems targeted at
| reducing IRFS aren't exactly a fan of VOIP numbers.
| ProZsolt wrote:
| Pricing:
|
| * Initial cost: $3/SIM
|
| * Monthly cost: $2/SIM (you can inactivate it at any time)
|
| * Data: $0.10 / MB
|
| * SMS: $0.01 / SMS
|
| Looks good for applications that only sends a small amount of
| data.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| What's the difference between an SMS command and just sending
| data? It says they charge 10 cents for a Mb but 5 cents for a
| data command. Can I just send a command that is less than a Mb
| and save money?
| Jarwain wrote:
| It appears they charge by the byte, so it'd only be efficient
| to use SMS if the payload is greater than 512KB
| toast0 wrote:
| SMS payload is 140 bytes. (160 characters with 7-bit
| characters)
| makaimc wrote:
| Twilio Developer Evangelist here. Our Super SIM Product Manager
| @matjaxon had his comments held up since he has a new HN
| account so I'm passing this along from him: "You could send the
| same information to and from your devices using either SMS
| Commands or data but it would likely cost you a lot more to use
| SMS Commands. While our prices start at $0.10 per MB, we bill
| you in bytes.
|
| For example, if each time your device checks in you exchange 50
| KB of data, you could do that 20 times for $0.10. You can only
| communicate with your device twice using SMS Commands at $0.05
| per SMS Command. SMS Commands are often used as a way of
| configuring some IoT hardware solutions where you can set
| configuration values over SMS or to communicate with your
| device if it seems like something is going wrong with its data
| connection. It's an extra way of interacting with your device
| that may be deployed into the field thousands of mile away from
| you."
| xrisk wrote:
| Could a potential use case be soldering these onto consumer
| electronics and phoning home telemetry even if the user doesn't
| connect to WiFi?
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Yes. So long as you have a subscription service (or are willing
| to eat the cost). This is how many home security systems handle
| things these days. No need for a phone line (which can be cut)
| or wifi (which is lost with a power outage). A control panel
| and the sensors have batteries that continue operating despite
| power loss and network outages.
| mrshadowgoose wrote:
| Potentially yes. This is just a SIM card, so one would
| additionally need to have a modem, consistent power source and
| space for all of these extra items. The value of the telemetry
| would need to be worth several dollars / month over several
| years to justify this.
| Ductapemaster wrote:
| A powerful use case here is at-home medical devices (think
| blood glucose monitors). With a SIM and cellular service, they
| can work anywhere, be agnostic to consumer WiFi issues (oops,
| someone changed the WiFi password!), and give "real-time"
| updates to a doctor or other health professional. Getting
| patient data has a huge barrier today and there is a ton of
| room for improvement, leaving the door open to better/more
| proactive care.
| ilaksh wrote:
| What type of IoT device would I install this SIM in? Are there
| SBCs that come with a place to plug in a SIM and everything else
| needed to run it? I thought all of those types of things were
| made for phones.
|
| Edit: After some googling, found out about cellular IoT and
| GSM/GPRS modules for things like Arduino. Will that work with
| these Super SIMs?
| throwawaysea wrote:
| Apologies if this is a dumb question - can I use this on a person
| phone for consumer use cases (voice/text/data)?
| skrtskrt wrote:
| Yes but the data is crazy expensive for that use case.
|
| Companies that offer this aggregate connectivity through
| carriers across many countries which can vary widely in price,
| so they have to price in order to protect themselves in case
| someone only uses it in (insert most expensive region).
|
| So you're paying premium for it to work many places. And it's
| intended for small data chunks that would be sent by things
| like IOT sensor clusters.
|
| If you know you're only going to use it in (these N regions)
| you could possibly work with them to get a better rate and have
| them blacklist your traffic in the more expensive regions.
| matjaxon wrote:
| Hi there, Matt Jackson from Twilio here. I'm the Product
| Manager for Super SIM. This is definitely not a dumb question.
| In fact, all of us on the Super SIM team have really enjoyed
| reading this thread and learning what you have questions about!
|
| Super SIMs can be put into any device that has a SIM card slot,
| including almost any cell phone, but they are not designed to
| be a replacement for your cell phone's SIM card. Super SIM is
| specialized for IoT: it doesn't support traditional circuit
| network components used for traditional voice calling or SMS so
| these won't work like you expect. However, any apps that use
| data instead for chat or VoIP calling, such as iMessage or
| WhatsApp, will work. Overall, we wouldn't recommend using your
| Super SIM as your regular SIM for your consumer cell phone,
| although some people at Twilio have put Twilio SIMs into their
| phones to see what this is like :)
| pheeney wrote:
| > it doesn't support traditional circuit network components
| used for traditional voice calling or SMS so these won't work
| like you expect.
|
| Does this mean that the number associated with the Super SIM
| would be classified as VOIP and rejected by certain systems
| that require a "real" number. For example using the new SIM
| in any phone number verification system that rejects google
| voice and other providers.
| matjaxon wrote:
| Good question. Super SIMs actually don't have a phone
| number that is publicly addressable. You could use a Twilio
| phone number and our voice SDK to wire up VoIP calling to
| and from a device; however, Twilio phone numbers will be
| treated as VoIP numbers and can often not be used for
| verification systems.
| bwooceli wrote:
| you can use their normal programmable wireless for that. I did
| and pay $1/month to have a sim sit in a $30 Nokia dumbphone
| that the kids can use when they ride their bikes to the park.
|
| There are ... quirks. Turns out the SIM cards have a "real"
| phone number that you don't know about, so even though you're
| routing calls and SMS through your twilio number and outbound
| dials only show as the twilio number, you will still get random
| calls that don't hit the twilio network. My sim's "real" number
| is a detroit number, and I used to get a handful of collections
| calls on it from the previous occupant of that number.
| wrkronmiller wrote:
| You would probably rack up hundreds or thousands of dollars per
| month in data charges.
| adriand wrote:
| I've always thought it would be fun to make experimental hardware
| devices with this type of technology. An example:
|
| Build a solar-powered device that you stick up in a tree in a
| forested patch near an urban center where kids go and have bush
| parties/bonfires/etc. The device would include a text-to-speech
| synthesizer. It's dormant most of the time, but designed to
| activate when people are around it at night. As the "admin", you
| get a notification when it turns on and can receive some low-res
| video/audio from the scene, and you can send it messages that are
| read aloud using the TTS synth.
|
| I imagine it would be quite disconcerting if you were smoking pot
| in the woods and suddenly a voice in the trees started talking to
| you.
| Apofis wrote:
| Brilliant! Get this man investments!
| Confiks wrote:
| I can imagine such a device would be quite disconcerting to
| Winston and Julia as well, hidden away in a natural clearing;
| around a tiny grassy knoll surrounded by tall saplings that
| shut it in completely.
| stjo wrote:
| Orwell underestimated our ability to make surveillance
| devices tiny and sprinkle them everywhere
| bttrfl wrote:
| Attaching devices to trees is actually a serious challenge that
| people are working on in order to provide better fire detection
| systems. Major obstacle is charging and there were,
| unsuccessful AFAIK, attempts to charge them using the energy
| provided by trees themselves.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| wow just let them be. they're surveilled enough as is without
| literally the trees having ears...
| dmix wrote:
| Call the git repo "moses" or "burning-bush".
| bredren wrote:
| I worked on IoT projects for two major wireless carriers both
| trying to sell hardware integrated with data management. I think
| the idea was to sort of create value-added services on top of the
| dumb pipe.
|
| Both companies invested heavily in the projects and both failed
| badly.
|
| One of the major issues was just getting a dev setup using all
| the proprietary stuff involved. Onboarding developers was just
| one issue.
|
| Both systems tied together a bunch of partners, and the folks
| running both shows had no technical background. Nor their
| managers.
|
| Order the SIM from the console makes things pretty easy.
|
| Twilio has consistently delivered easy ways to access cell stuff.
| This is def a step in the right direction. It would be awesome to
| tinker with this product for sensor data.
| [deleted]
| MichaelApproved wrote:
| @matjaxon - A lot of your comments here are getting deleted. If
| you're not deleting them yourself, I suspect it's because you're
| making a lot of comments with a new account and getting caught in
| the spam filter.
|
| Someone from HN should undelete your comments.
| matjaxon wrote:
| Thanks appreciate the heads up! I reached out to HN and they
| verified my account. Always ever been a lurker and made an
| account today. You were spot on about why they were getting
| caught in the filter.
| lyime wrote:
| What hardware would you recommend?
| joeyspn wrote:
| RasPi or Arduino
| ksec wrote:
| @Dang, I am seeing lots of valuable replies from @matjaxon from
| Twilio being shown as [dead]. I presume all these replies wont
| show up normally as most have their HN settings as default.
|
| I guess this is happening because it is a new account. ( Likely
| to combat Spam ).
| lowmemcpu wrote:
| Is this intended for consumers or corporations? Could someone
| clarify the use-cases? It looks like it's $100+ for 1GB of data
| mrshadowgoose wrote:
| This is not intended for direct use by consumers. This is
| intended for devices that require internet connectivity, but
| might not have reliable access to a WiFi or wired network.
|
| Examples include: fleet management vehicle trackers,
| meteorology sensors, centrally controllable streetlamps
|
| These are commonly referred to as Internet of Things (IoT)
| applications.
|
| These devices typically use a very small amount of bandwidth
| (relative to a mobile phone user) but need the reliability of
| being able to roam across multiple networks. Hence the
| relatively steep $100/GB.
| matjaxon wrote:
| Hi there, Matt Jackson from Twilio here. I'm the Product
| Manager for Super SIM, and I can try to answer these questions:
|
| _Is this intended for consumers or corporations?_
|
| It's for developers! We try not to look at our offerings as
| being strictly for consumers or corporations, but rather for
| the developers who use them, regardless of where they work. We
| want any developer with an IoT idea to be able to pursue it,
| whether their team is one person or one hundred. (This is a
| common philosophy at Twilio and was the thinking behind
| offering pay-as-you-go pricing on nearly all of our products.)
|
| _Could someone clarify the use-cases?_
|
| Super SIM is designed for cellular IoT, where we often see use
| cases like fleet tracking, industrial field monitoring, or
| micromobility. But there are a lot of use cases for cellular,
| with new ones showing up every day. An interesting trend we've
| seen is the use of cellular connectivity for things like point-
| of-sale systems in places where you normally expect there to be
| Wi-Fi. By using cellular connectivity, these point-of-sale
| platforms are able to eliminate the variability that comes with
| each different customer's Wi-Fi setup, offering their customers
| a much better out-of-the-box experience because their customers
| can simply turn on the system and get connected.
|
| _It looks like it's $100+ for 1GB of data_
|
| Our data prices start at $0.10 per MB but this pricing is meant
| to just get you started. We don't expect any of our developers
| to scale up their IoT business at these list prices. Once
| you're up and running, you can connect with one of our IoT
| sales specialists to discuss volume discounts.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| IoT devices don't use SIM cards for gigabytes of data; they use
| them for bytes and kilobytes of data. That's why this is billed
| by the byte.
| brandon wrote:
| This is likely aimed at $device_manufacturer that wants to put
| a cellular modem into their device for remote telemetry
| (uploading a tiny payload every 24 hours for the lifetime on
| the device). There's a lot of attention in the docs towards
| "fleets" -- they aren't expecting you to just buy one.
| wrkronmiller wrote:
| I imagine it's best-suited for corporations making devices that
| can be deployed to arbitrary countries. It looks like you're
| paying an enormous premium on data for the ability for this sim
| to "just work" internationally.
|
| Another use case might be for tinkerers creating very low-
| bandwidth applications (e.g. a few megabytes/texts per month).
|
| For anyone else I imagine it makes more sense just to buy a
| prepaid SIM and swap it out as-needed.
| [deleted]
| sjtgraham wrote:
| Have been using these and they work really well. One thing though
| is because Twilio is the carrier the internet breakout is via AWS
| so you will have AWS public IP addresses. We went back to the
| original Twilio wireless because the breakout is on T-Mobile IP
| ranges.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| If you're interested in this space, Hologram does the same thing
| (and appears to have had a head start compared to Twilio):
| https://hologram.io
| akulkarni wrote:
| Was going to post the same thing. I wonder how the two compare.
|
| Pricing-wise, seems like Twilio has higher fixed but lower
| usage costs:
|
| https://www.twilio.com/docs/iot/supersim
|
| | Starting at $2 per active Super SIM per month.
|
| | Data Usage - Starting at $0.10 / MB.
|
| https://hologram.io/pricing/
|
| | $1 per device per month + $0.38 / MB.
|
| Of course these prices depend on device volume. Twilio may be
| able to offer lower costs because of their scale, but perhaps
| Hologram can provide a better user experience because this is
| the only thing they do.
| ProZsolt wrote:
| For hologram.io it's $1.50/SIM + $0.40/MB under 100 devices,
| but only $0.65/SIM + $0.33/MB over 5000
| Dwolb wrote:
| These are just self-service pricing options to get people
| started on Day 1.
|
| When we price custom for enterprise (i.e. specific
| countries, carriers, roll-out plan), the pricing becomes a
| lot more flexible. Should be seeing updates to that
| messaging soon.
| kimi wrote:
| I'm frankly appalled at $0.10/MB. Are we still in the 90's?
| Ductapemaster wrote:
| I work for an IoT company, and I can tell you that data
| costs are high for IoT because the cost model is different.
| You purchase a 10GB plan from AT&T for your cell phone and
| they know that you likely won't use it all, so they can
| "oversell" data. With IoT, you have a much better handle on
| how much data you use so when you purchase a 10MB plan,
| they know you will use almost all of it. Additionally, IoT
| devices tend to have higher backend infrastructure costs as
| they often connect/disconnect from the towers as they wake
| up and go to sleep, or move around between towers /carriers
| a lot. Plus the "always roaming" statement above adds cost
| in exchange for flexibility.
|
| It's just a different business altogether.
| henryfjordan wrote:
| ATT offers an "unlimited" plan on their website right now
| with 100gb of "premium" (read unthrottled) data for
| $85/mo (goes down to $50 if you want 4 lines).
|
| Twillio is charging >10x the rate per-byte. ($1e-8 / byte
| compared to the $1e-9 that ATT charges).
|
| I don't know about you, but I use more than 1/10th of my
| data plan every month.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| >Twillio is charging >10x the rate per-byte.
|
| If you want to compare ATT to this offering, it would be
| fair to compare how much ATT for a single megabyte of
| pay-as-you-go international data. That price is $2.05
| according to https://upgradedpoints.com/att-
| international-phone-plans/#:~....
|
| They also won't give you a line for $2/month.
| vertex-four wrote:
| These devices are essentially roaming wherever they are.
| The use case is that you're sending _far_ smaller data than
| a megabyte in even a day - maybe a GPS update once an hour,
| that sort of thing.
| thrwaway69 wrote:
| A single visit to one of the apple's product landing page
| would cost - $5.
|
| Doesn't seem too bad to me.
| dominotw wrote:
| what are some of cool products built with this tech.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| My mailbox is in a block of other mailboxes that is fairly
| far from my home (say, 500m) and out of wifi range without an
| especially large antenna. I was thinking of making a small
| battery-powered widget to tell me when the mail arrived and
| adding it to my Home Assistant (https://www.home-
| assistant.io/) installation.
|
| Another use may be something like a device that warns if a
| locked, remote, storage area is accessed. In fact, almost any
| alarm system that lacks a cellular backup could add one
| pretty cheaply with this.
| simcop2387 wrote:
| LoRa WAN and such tech can be very useful for this.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| Thanks! I hadn't seen this!
| renewiltord wrote:
| Now that I know this exists, I'm going to use it as a bag
| tracker to tell me where my baggage went when I travel. I'll
| probably just get one and use it as my car tracker to tell me
| when to move for street parking. Or maybe I can just inactive
| it.
| skrtskrt wrote:
| Same with Telnyx:
|
| https://telnyx.com/products/wireless
| xwdv wrote:
| Looks great, we're using a similar product for building a massive
| guerrilla network of solar powered IOT devices in strategic
| locations collecting some alternative data for hedge funds.
| jtdev wrote:
| Think cargo ship containers and other similar internationally
| transient use cases. Sounds like an exciting product/service.
| Looking forward to seeing how this is used.
| gk1 wrote:
| Trucks, containers, ships, cars...
|
| But also anything that is centrally manufactured or managed but
| distributed globally. Imagine being able to buy and manage SIMs
| from one place regardless of whether your [connected thing]
| will be deployed in United States or in Timor-Leste.
| ben174 wrote:
| Any examples of getting one of these plugged into a Pi and having
| a script listen for SMS events and respond to them?
| Jtsummers wrote:
| https://www.twilio.com/docs/iot/supersim/getting-started-sup...
|
| One of their examples.
| VectorLock wrote:
| Do these services just support 1 or 2 sims? I can think of a few
| hacky projects to use these for. I think T-Mobile was going to
| start offering NB-IOT starting at $5 but I don't know how many
| minimum units or other stipulations they have.
| matjaxon wrote:
| Hi there, Matt Jackson from Twilio here. I'm the Product
| Manager for Super SIM.
|
| Our other cellular connectivity solution, Programmable
| Wireless, which we developed in partnership with T-Mobile, has
| a NB-IoT SIM that you can purchase from us if you're interested
| in checking out T-Mobile's narrowband network. If you don't
| have any hardware, you can purchase a Developer Kit for the
| T-Mobile USA NB-IoT network from our Console which comes with
| some hardware and a NB-IoT SIM.
|
| https://www.twilio.com/wireless/narrowband
| cordite wrote:
| Viewing this site took 4.5MB with trackers.
|
| That's half a dollar of data. Now I understand that IOT stuff
| would likely have smaller payloads. But that really looks like a
| great way to rack up costs with a run away program submitting or
| retrieving data in a bad loop.
| gk1 wrote:
| Pretty sure you could set limits or alerts on bandwidth usage
| to avoid that.
| matjaxon wrote:
| Hi there, Matt Jackson from Twilio here. I'm the Product
| Manager for Super SIM. With Super SIM you can configure a data
| limit for your SIMs as a guardrail against potential runaway
| applications. You can set this to a value as low as 1MB. If you
| know that your use case doesn't require a lot of data, such as
| occasionally sending a little bit of JSON with some sensor
| readings, you can set this to a low number to keep your costs
| down in case something does go awry.
| AdamJacobMuller wrote:
| Is there any way to contain or firewall the SIMs such that
| they only have access to specific networks? That seems like
| the holy grail of avoiding people buying IoT devices for
| their SIM (e.g. what happened with early kindles and many
| other devices).
| matjaxon wrote:
| Great question! Super SIM has a feature called Network
| Access Profiles that lets you pick exactly which cellular
| networks you want your devices to be able to connect to. A
| lot of other cellular solutions, Twilio's other cellular
| connectivity solution included, give you really rudimentary
| control such as do you want access to the United States
| (yes/no) and do you want the rest of the world (yes/no).
| Network Access Profiles lets you pick exactly which
| countries and which networks inside those countries you can
| connect to so you can build access just the networks that
| you want to.
| AdamJacobMuller wrote:
| What I mean more is, once those devices are connected to
| "the network" is there a way to limit the usage of those
| SIMs so they could only connect to my systems, and not
| connect to "the internet" at large.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| I really appreciate Twilio's features that limit unexpected
| costs. I have a personal Twilio account I use to tinker, and
| to run a simple phone system for my small business, and I
| would be super worried about doing that if it was like AWS
| where the best I could get was alerts. Instead Twilio let's
| me charge my account upfront and disables it if I hit that
| cap. It's great peace of mind for smaller users.
| rcoder wrote:
| If you imagine "IoT" as "a bunch of Linux boxes pushing around
| multi-MB JSON payloads over fast network pipes" then yeah, this
| would be a bad deal.
|
| For datagram-based protocols like CoAP which are explicitly
| designed to let you control bandwidth usage down to the packet
| level this should be fine. 1kB of data (which is honestly large
| for a normal telemetry or sensor payload) is really cheap, even
| at $0.10 per MB.
|
| Many of the devices and network architectures in this space are
| made to literally wake up a few times a day and push/pull data,
| not keep idle connections up and running. Your "runaway loop"
| would kill the device's battery and cause a bunch of other red
| flags in such a topology long before it racked up substantial
| bandwidth charges.
| ProZsolt wrote:
| CoAP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constrained_Application_P
| rotoc...
| Gamemaster1379 wrote:
| Some companies implement IoT by using protocols other than
| HTTP. For instance, CoAP is one I'm familiar with which can
| significantly reduce bandwidth consumption.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| MQTT is common.
| sb8244 wrote:
| I wonder if this will be like Programmable Wireless where you
| can get cheaper data rates for different levels of commit.
| Their pricing page says "starts at" and doesn't really go into
| how they handle bulk discount.
|
| If this really is the pricing, then it's definitely IOT focused
| instead of Programmable Wireless's more general focus.
| matjaxon wrote:
| Hi there, Matt Jackson from Twilio here. I'm the Product
| Manager for Super SIM. Glad you're familiar with Programmable
| Wireless, our other cellular connectivity offering!
|
| The "starts at" that we have on our pricing page is for the
| cheapest priced networks we have in each country. For
| example, in the UK we have a number of networks that are
| $0.10 per MB but if you want to use EE it's $0.20 per MB.
| With our Network Access Profiles, you can pick exactly which
| networks you want your Super SIMs to be able to connect to.
| If EE is the only network that services your area or works
| best with your hardware and is worth premium to use, you can
| enable it for your Super SIMs.
|
| For now, we just have a pay-as-you-go pricing plan for Super
| SIM whereas Programmable Wireless has a number of different
| quota plans that let you commit to a minimum monthly spend
| per SIM in exchange for discounts as a way for you to self
| service into lower data costs for hungrier devices. Our pay-
| as-you-go prices are meant to just get you started. We don't
| expect any of our developers to scale up their IoT business
| at these list prices. Once you're up and running, you can
| connect with one of our IoT sales specialists to discuss
| volume discounts. Promise they don't bite!
| gk1 wrote:
| Looks like a killer of all other IoT connectivity solutions (eg,
| Verizon, AT&T, Particle). Those IoT platforms better find a way
| to support third-party SIMs, if they don't already.
|
| Source: Consulted AT&T on bringing their IoT Connectivity
| solution to market. Their huge cell network was the main selling
| point; the platform and services were add-ons.
|
| Edit: Another commenter mentioned Hologram, which already has a
| global Sim and therefore a lead start. I haven't watched this
| space for a few years and forgot about them. Good for them!
| elwes5 wrote:
| I know the Verizon one does. It just is not on their pages. The
| platform they bought from Qualcomm to do it was in that same
| space as Twilio. Been a few years though they may have ripped
| it out by this point. 10 cents per MB and 5 cents per SMS.
| Ouch!
| Gamemaster1379 wrote:
| Particle has a number of devices that already support third
| party SIMs (their Electron and Boron lines in particular).
|
| Particle also has partnered with Twilio in the past. I know
| there was some legacy integration with Twilio SIMs.
|
| Particle's value prop is an IoT platform where cellular
| connectivity is a component. If anything, this seems like it
| would be complimentary and not a killer to their value prop.
| gk1 wrote:
| Valid point. I mean this kills their connectivity offering,
| which in my AT&T example was the core thing. Sounds like
| Particle now treats connectivity as a commodity and focuses
| on the platform. Good decision.
| Ductapemaster wrote:
| Thanks for the mention! I'm an employee at Particle, and this
| is exactly it. I'll be honest and say that dealing with
| carriers _sucks_. If you want to bring your IoT device to
| market, you want to focus on building that device -- not
| negotiating with AT &T or Verizon. We protect our users from
| that so you can focus on your core competencies and shipping
| your products.
|
| We leverage our large deployed base of devices for
| negotiations in a way that you cannot if you are a single IoT
| business. We've actually had customers use Particle, decide
| they wanted to do their own thing for cost/complexity
| reasons, start a relationship with the carriers, and come
| running back because it was intractable for them.
| Animats wrote:
| So, it's a VPN for cellular data, right?
| gk1 wrote:
| How did you arrive at that?
|
| It's a SIM to enable IoT devices to connect to (almost) any
| available network. It is not cloaking the origin of the data,
| or even if it is, that's not why companies will buy this.
| Animats wrote:
| That's what a virtual private network is - an overlay on
| transport networks to allow a group of devices under the same
| ownership to communicate. While VPNs are often used to cloak
| IP addresses, they were originally a corporate thing. Your
| in-house net could be transported over the public Internet
| while keeping its in-house address space and some degree of
| privacy.
| neximo64 wrote:
| So, human beings are basically apes, right?
| bborud wrote:
| It is interesting to see how many telcos have failed at building
| IoT connectivity products that work. If you work for one of
| these, feel free to reach out.
|
| We will be open sourcing a server (written in Go with a Vue
| frontend) that can run on a regular private APN to provide
| developers with self service management and connectivity to their
| NB-IoT and LTE-M devices.
|
| If you want to have a look around you can take a peek at a beta
| of the software running at https://nbiot.engineering/
| mleonhard wrote:
| A couple of suggestions for the landing page:
|
| 1) Explain what the product is, at the top of the page.
|
| 2) Remove the distracting animated background.
|
| 3) Switch out the graphic for "Shop" from a woman holding bags
| to a non-gendered icon. The page currently has three men
| working and one woman shopping. Some may think it portrays
| sexist attitudes.
| rsync wrote:
| No verizon support, unfortunately ...
|
| https://www.twilio.com/docs/iot/supersim/available-networks#...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Are there any geo areas where ATT+TMO/Sprint (combined due to
| merger) isn't at parity with VZ?
| bob12co wrote:
| I live in a mountainous area, and there is a very large
| difference. So much so that VZ is basically my only option.
|
| I think what happens is that tower leases in some protected
| areas can be hard to negotiate, so the cost/benefit ratio
| gets out of whack for new towers (amongst other issues with
| power, construction, and RF propagation in remote, mountain
| areas). Maybe someone with more knowledge can chime in.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Towers are typically owned by a REIT (real estate
| investment trust) or other entity that develops the tower
| and telco/equipment shelter and then leases out space on
| the tower to mobile providers (cost is higher to the mobile
| provider the higher you want to be on the tower).
|
| In some locations, there just isn't any land to site the
| tower due to regs (national parks comes to mind, nothing
| except my Iridium hotspot works in parts of the Smokey
| Mountains), so there are no providers or a single provider
| who was able to swing a special case on an existing tower
| (water tower or similar).
| avree wrote:
| Yes, many. Verizon is still the only option for reception in
| many areas--I live in Los Altos Hills, and the only provider
| with reception for much of the town is Verizon.
| matjaxon wrote:
| Hi there, Matt Jackson from Twilio here. I'm the Product
| Manager for Super SIM. You're right, we currently don't have
| support for Verizon but we hope to be able to add it in the
| future. We understand that different developers have different
| connectivity preferences, so we designed our system to be
| flexible to adding new partners to the platform. As we continue
| to add networks, the networks of the future should become
| available to Super SIMs bought today.
|
| With Super SIM you can also have access to multiple networks at
| once. For example, if you're connected to T-Mobile and move to
| an area where there isn't coverage, your device can
| automatically switch over to AT&T. This gives you redundant
| connectivity too in case any one network or tower goes down.
| csa wrote:
| Vouched for Matt's reply to overcome HN spam filter.
|
| Matt, I'm not sure what the spam filter is latching in to,
| but you may want to try varying your opening line a little
| bit for each response.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Curious as to how does this compare to "Programmable Wireless"
| and whether it supports calls and SMS? It's not clear whether
| it's an evolution of Programmable Wireless or something totally
| separate. I tend towards the latter because the documentation is
| separate between both offerings.
|
| Last time I tried Programmable Wireless it was very lacking.
| Calls were not supported on roaming at all (so I couldn't test it
| as I'm outside the US) and SMS was very flaky; some texts
| outright bypassed the SMS to API routing and were handled by the
| upstream carrier directly.
|
| There was also a "bug" where you couldn't send SMS to the SIM
| using an arbitrary originator number. I say bug in quotes because
| I'm sure there is some obscure reason for it (or is it to cover a
| limitation?) because the error code returned was custom and
| seemed explicitly made for this reason (and was not mentioned on
| any docs).
|
| I understand it was in early beta when I tried it but none of
| these issues were resolved even years later.
| sjtgraham wrote:
| Super SIM is on Twilio's own core networking stack rather than
| being a shim on top of T-Mobile. Presumably these issues would
| be resolved with Super SIM. (I don't know if they have been
| yet)
| [deleted]
| matjaxon wrote:
| Hi there, Matt Jackson from Twilio here. I'm the Product
| Manager for Super SIM. It's great to hear that you tested out
| Programmable Wireless and your feedback is appreciated.
|
| _How does Super SIM compare to Programmable Wireless?_
|
| Super SIM is a separate offering from Programmable Wireless.
| Our first IoT connectivity solution, Programmable Wireless, was
| developed in partnership with T-Mobile, allowing us to connect
| to T-Mobile's global partner network and run on top of
| T-Mobile's mobile core infrastructure. For Super SIM, we
| developed our own cloud scale mobile core that allows us to
| connect with multiple partners, offering a comprehensive,
| guaranteed list of tier-1 networks for your devices to connect
| to. Moreover, with Super SIM, we're able to extend control to
| you as the developer by letting you choose which networks your
| Super SIMs can and cannot connect to. This is really important
| for IoT use cases where your hardware may not be compatible
| with all of the networks that are available in a country. While
| we offer a lot of our networks at the same price, there are
| some that may be more costly but can offer you more redundant
| coverage or coverage in more remote regions. You can choose
| which networks work best for your use case and your customers
| and take control of your connectivity.
|
| _Does Super SIM support voice calling and SMS?_
|
| Super SIM was designed with IoT use cases in mind that
| primarily use data. You can use our SMS Commands API to send
| machine-to-machine SMS between your device and your cloud but
| Super SIM does not support sending or receiving SMS from other
| phone numbers. Super SIM does not support traditional calling
| such as with a smartphone's native dialer.
|
| _Why can't I send SMS with an arbitrary originator number with
| Programmable Wireless SIMs? Is this a bug?_
|
| This is the intended behavior. When you send a SMS from a
| phone's messaging apps with Programmable Wireless SIMs that
| message gets handled by Twilio's Programmable SMS APIs. You
| cannot set the from number on those messages to a phone number
| that is not a Twilio phone number that you own. This prevents
| number spoofing which while it has valid uses, it's often used
| for SMS spamming which Twilio takes very seriously so this is a
| limitation to that feature.
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