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Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta

twilio.com

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Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta

#41

Post by skrtskrt »

throwawaysea wrote: post #29

Apologies if this is a dumb question - can I use this on a person phone for consumer use cases (voice/text/data)?

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.

Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta

#42

Post by rcoder »

cordite wrote: post #6

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.

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.

Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta

#43

Post by kimi »

akulkarni wrote: post #27
Nextgrid wrote: post #10

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

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 cost…

I'm frankly appalled at $0.10/MB. Are we still in the 90's?

Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta

#45

Post by sjtgraham »

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.

Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta

#46

Post by vertex-four »

kimi wrote: post #43
akulkarni wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cost…

I'm frankly appalled at $0.10/MB. Are we still in the 90's?

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.

Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta

#47

Post by thrwaway69 »

kimi wrote: post #43
akulkarni wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cost…

I'm frankly appalled at $0.10/MB. Are we still in the 90's?

A single visit to one of the apple's product landing page would cost - $5.

Doesn't seem too bad to me.

Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta

#48

Post by sjtgraham »

Nextgrid wrote: post #8

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…

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)

Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta

#49

Post by Jarwain »

polishdude20 wrote: post #39

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?

It appears they charge by the byte, so it'd only be efficient to use SMS if the payload is greater than 512KB

Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta

#50

Post by bwooceli »

throwawaysea wrote: post #29

Apologies if this is a dumb question - can I use this on a person phone for consumer use cases (voice/text/data)?

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.

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