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Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta

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Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta

#121

Post by renewiltord »

Nextgrid wrote: post #105
renewiltord wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The baggage only needs an infrequent duty cycle, right? Like once an hour should do the trick. I don't think I have to attach a large enough battery that I need to not put it in luggage. If it doesn't work out it doesn't.

For the car I have a ciggy socket.

Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta

#122

Post by 908087 »

xwdv wrote: post #99

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.

Sweet, more creepy surveillance devices.

> about: Ethically challenged software engineer working for a major tech company

Seems to check out.

Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta

#123

Post by somehnguy »

adriand wrote: post #31

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 "a…

While kinda funny to imagine up I would hope somewhere in the process between developing the hardware and physically hanging it in the tree you would have a 'oh no!' moment and realize just how creepy what you're doing is :)

Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta

#124

Post by matjaxon »

Nextgrid wrote: post #111
matjaxon wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Last time I tried Programmable Wireless, iMessage explicitly didn't work; the activation text (sent in the background to Apple to verify your number and activate iMessage) was being swallowed by the underlying carrier and ended up verifying the internal number of the SIM (a T-Mobile number) instead of being delivered to me through HTTP (so I could route it myself through the Twilio number I wanted to use as outgoing)…

You can use iMessage if you use it with only data but that does limit your ability to only using iMessage with other iMessage users. When you put the Programmable Wireless SIM in your phone you'll be prompted to associate that number with iMessage, if you deny it, then you it won't pick up that number on the SIM with iMessage. I personally use this solution when traveling out of the country with a Programmable Wireless SIM in my iPhone. It "works" but unfortunately in a limited manner (i.e. data only).

Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta

#125

Post by owowow »

vertex-four wrote: post #103
henryfjordan wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

AT&T's IoT pricing seems to undercut Twilio and Hologram on price: https://marketplace.att.com/products/att-iot-dataplans-lte-n...

This platform has been around for at least 4 years iirc.

Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta

#126

Post by DenisM »

adriand wrote: post #31

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 "a…

Eavesdropping is illegal in a number of states.

Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta

#127

Post by jsjohnst »

matjaxon wrote: post #117
ilaksh wrote: post #93

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?

Yep Arduino's or RaspberryPis are solid platforms to get started with. We have a couple quickstarts that you can checkout. https://www.twilio.com/blog/super-sim-quickstart-adafruit-fo... https://www.twilio.com/blog/super-sim-quickstart-arduino-mkr...

Just to confirm, but a GSM module won’t work for AT&T (but will for the time being for T-Mobile) in the US, right? To my knowledge, AT&T has shut down most (all?) of their GSM network and is only LTE (in its various flavors).

Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta

#128

Post by sjtgraham »

Nextgrid wrote: post #108
sjtgraham wrote: post #45

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.

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.

I really don’t know the answer to that. The latency wasn’t noticeable for me but I’m in SF. Breakout was coming from us-east-1. I believe traffic will always go via Twilio anyway but I don’t know if they have a multi region setup.

Interesting data point the “home network” on the SIMs we used was Telefonica.

Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta

#129

Post by Dwolb »

owowow wrote: post #125
vertex-four wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

AT&T's IoT pricing seems to undercut Twilio and Hologram on price: https://marketplace.att.com/products/att-iot-dataplans-lte-n... This platform has been around for at least 4 years iirc.

It’s showing $1.50/MB and $22/GB and it’s a network configuration that is AT&T except in areas that don’t have service it’ll allow regional carriers and TMo.

Hologram SIMs are price competitive here and allow devices to connect to the best network available without unfavorable network preference schemes.

Definitely difficult to parse.

Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta

#130

Post by Dwolb »

goleksiak wrote: post #114
dominotw wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what are some of cool products built with this tech.

https://www.eatabit.io is built on it. We were one of their first beta clients. We used every M2M carrier previously and Twilio is easily superior in cost & reliability. The cellular data space has alot of problems especially with roaming: cell phones transparently switch between networks but data SIMs have a very limited set of networks they can operate on. If Twilio can get VZW access on these SIMs they will have a…

I’m interested to hear how the multi-IMSI setup performs globally and how the devices handle the SIM profile switches.
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