So, it's a VPN for cellular data, right?
So, human beings are basically apes, right?
Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta
101–110 of 149 posts
Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta
#102Do 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.
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 C…
Do you support accounts with 1 sim?
Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
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.
If you go to AT&T and say "I want 10,000 SIMs that'll let me use a few kilobytes of data a day, with enterprise management features", they either won't sell them to you or will sell them at prices comparable to Twilio (except they won't work when out of range of an AT&T tower, and certainly won't work overseas). Their minimum pay-as-you-go plan that includes any data at all seems to be about $30/mo - if you're using maybe 10 kilobytes a day, that's not feasible.
Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta
#104Curious 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…
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…
> This is the intended behavior.
You are misunderstanding. I am not talking about sending SMSs from the SIM to the outside world. That would indeed open you up to spoofing and all kinds of abuse.
I am talking about the the other way around. I have a message from the outside world (whether received through a Twilio number but handed to my own application for processing so Twilio's context of the original sending number is lost, or from a different source like Slack or Telegram) and want to send it off to a SIM, using an arbitrary sender number to distinguish between conversations. This fails too, despite there not being any obvious abuse that I can think of.
Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
what are some of cool products built with this tech.
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.
How will you deal with charging? As far as I know connectivity has been a solved problem for over a decade now (on a small scale you could always just get a consumer SIM and use that), but power consumption is a problem. This is why Tile trackers for example use BLE tags and nearby phones instead of just embedding a SIM in their trackers.
Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta
#106Could 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 req…
I have tried the same with their previous offering called "Programmable Wireless" and both voice support was lacking abroad and SMS had an issue where you can't send arbitrary caller IDs for SMSs sent to the SIM (so if you receive an SMS on a Twilio number but process it in your code before deciding whether to send it to a SIM, or receiving an SMS on a non-Twilio number).
Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta
#107Could 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 req…
I suspect the phone numbers will still show up as a voip number, which is probably be an issue for sms validation.
There are carriers out there that sell "real" numbers at least here in the UK. I'm sure the same exists elsewhere.
Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta
#108Have 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.
Do you know what the latency is and whether they're doing some magic around roaming where the data session is terminated locally?
Their previous offering always went out through T-Mobile in the US which always added an unnecessary round trip across the Atlantic if you were in Europe.
Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta
#109Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta
#110So this does not provide the wireless stack just the sim. But with software SIMs these days why is a piece hardware needed? Is it a bit late to the party? Particularly for IoT devices, given the wireless stack is anyway needed along with the RF, it makes sense to cut out other SIM in favor of software.