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Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta

twilio.com

81–90 of 149 posts

Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta

#81

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

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.

Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta

#82
post #71

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…

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.

Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta

#83
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.

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 yo…

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).

Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta

#84
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…

Brilliant! Get this man investments!

Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta

#85
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…

wow just let them be. they're surveilled enough as is without literally the trees having ears...

Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta

#86

Earlier 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.

>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.

Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

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).

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.

Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta

#88

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

what are some of cool products built with this tech.

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.

Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta

#89
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…

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.

Re: Twilio Super Sim – Public Beta

#90
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.
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