
Plivo makes it to 50 countries in 30 days, outstrips competition - yabbadabbadoo
http://venturebeat.com/2012/08/13/plivo-makes-it-to-50-countries-in-30-days-outstrips-competition/
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casca
Twilio is the 800lb gorilla in this space in terms of buzz, but it's fantastic
to see that there's strong competition offering a wider set of countries and
better pricing. We're using Twilio because they meet our requirements and the
great sign-up promo, but phone numbers are not very sticky.

~~~
bevenky
Give www.plivo.com a roll and let us know your feedback :)

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HorizonXP
I'm actually going to try Plivo really soon for my PlayBook/BB10 app. I was
going to use Twilio, but I ran into issues with their voice client. It doesn't
seem like they want to resolve it. A pity, because it's likely a small issue
with their Flash implementation.

With Plivo, it seems that I can get all the benefits of Twilio, at a better
price, and it seems to be more open. Moreover, I can connect to it via SIP.
And there are OSS libraries available to help me with that part.

~~~
taf2
Does plivo provide a similar voice client? looks like they only provide a
small subset of the features twilio provides...

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kondro
I really like where Plivo is heading and Venky (bevenky@HN) is very helpful.

I love that Plivo is concentrating on features and functionality that make
building a scalable product easy. It's one thing dealing with the pain of
scaling telephone infrastructure, but Plivo is allowing us to more easily
scale our backend control infrastructure too (primarily though callbacks).

Not to mention that we are based in Australia, a country that is generally
ignored by this type of service.

~~~
bevenky
Thanks kondro for the nice words. Happy to help :)

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fufulabs
At least list out the 50 countries. After reading the blog post and hunting on
their site for 10 minutes, i still cannot find the countries Plivo is
compatible with.

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bevenky
List is here on the blog:
[http://blog.plivo.com/post/29375534048/international-
launch-...](http://blog.plivo.com/post/29375534048/international-launch-
in-50-countries-across-europe)

Sorry for the delay.

~~~
manveru
You list Europe as country?

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tricolon
And Belgium twice, Puerto Rico as "Porto Rico", and Luxembourg as "Luxemborg".

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corin_
Seems that for some of these countries (at least the UK), Twilio is still some
way ahead, in that Plivo can't do outbound SMS or freephone numbers.

Noticed an interesting price thing with Twilio while comparing, which seems
misleading to me... The big numbers on <https://www.twilio.com/voice/pricing>
for the UK state 10c/min for mobiles, but lower down the smaller print shows
that this price is only for a few prefixes (44751, 44754, 44759, 447500), and
that most mobile numbers (all other 447) are 32c/min.

~~~
bevenky
we are working on adding freephone and outbound sms soon :)

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corin_
While you're here, I just created an account, on your login form it says
"Username/Email ID" but it only seems to work with username, not email.

Also, I'm sure you've already considered it so probably no point me mentioning
it, but would be interested if you could share your reasoning for not offering
the free credit like Twilio do. As a single point of data, I signed up for
Twilio and started playing around because of that offer (even though it meant
putting a little in myself), despite having no use for it at the time. Without
it I probably wouldn't have bothered, whereas now I'm someone who, while never
had the need to spend more than a few dollars here and there with them, am
happy using their service as my go-to whenever I need any voip/sms stuff.

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bevenky
Regarding the first point, can you email us at support@plivo.com, and we will
see why it is not working.

Regarding free credits, at this point we made the decision to not offer any at
the time of registration. I obviously cannot comment on what others are doing,
however happy to connect with you to understand your use case and see how we
can get you on boarded.

~~~
corin_
I'm not honestly worth your connecting with, for the most part I'm just
someone who enjoys messing around with stuff like this :)

Will send an email about the logging in issue.

~~~
bevenky
Everything/everyone doesn't have to be worth based on the $$ you bring us.
Your comments sounded interesting and I still feel connecting would be a good
idea :)

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gabaix
Why does this article feel like a YC ad?

"Plivo makes it to 50 countries in 30 days". and "In many countries, setting
up a phone solution is challenging and involves negotiations with carriers,
hardware, and network configuration." Wouldn't that mean the startup has been
working for some time to reach that scale? no offense for the startup, but the
article sounds biased. I do not trust an article overly emphatic with few
details.

~~~
jacques_chester
> Why does this article feel like a YC ad?

Because it'll be a lightly-edited version of a press release that was sent to
VentureBeat by Plivo.

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georgemcbay
This may not be particularly useful information and maybe it is just me but I
have a serious case of word aversion to the name Plivo.

[http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004835.h...](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004835.html)

<http://www.good.is/post/why-do-we-hate-the-word-moist/>

~~~
ad93611
Sure, you may like this, <http://www.unixguide.net/freebsd/faq/16.19.shtml>

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jdangu
The business of adding a friendly web service on top of these SMS and IVR
aggregators is already commoditized: Most aggregators will give you 10s of
countries in a single integration.

Then it's a question of volume to reach higher tiers / lower costs, and/or
getting enough funding to sustain low margins at launch.

Twilio has both the volume and the funding. Hopefully Plivo can differentiate
through innovation.

~~~
rdl
I ended up not using Twilio because they didn't support SIP (I mean, JFC,
that's like building a mail product which doesn't support SMTP, just because
SMTP is kind of crappy).

Plivo supporting SIP out of the box means I'm a lot more interested,
independent of price. Supporting wideband (G.722) would be my other
requirement.

~~~
bevenky
we already support wideband and g722 specifically :)

welcome to the party

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rokhayakebe
Hi Plivo,

Can you guys work on the documentation? It's unclear after a few minutes how
the SMS API works other than sending a text.

~~~
bevenky
We are working hard on this stuff. Any specific questions would request you to
shoot us a mail at support@plivo.com or live chat on the site.

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rdl
Is Plivo hosted on AWS like Twilio?

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bevenky
Not at all. AWS is a bad technology choice for Voice/Media servers. We run on
100% dedicated boxes for our Voice /Media servers which span multiple Data
centers to ensure uptime.

And we can still scale as its needed.

~~~
corin_
I can see why one could argue against using AWS in a generic situation, but
what specifically makes it bad for voice/media servers?

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bevenky
Voice Calls which heavily depends on Kernel timing for encoding and decoding.
Running a OS timer on a virtual machine will mess up things 1. When higher
load is pumped 2. Conference audio mixing

Hence AWS or any other Virtual machine wasn't our first choice for Voice/Media
Servers.

~~~
rdl
Yeah, that's a major issue with more loaded machines, especially with
older/worse virtualization technologies. It seems tolerable on Twilio, and
I've run asterisk and freeswitch on virtualized machines (with HVM) which work
ok.

My reason for not wanting VoIP gateway on AWS is that I want to use it for
AWS-hosted-app error reporting, so having dependencies on AWS is a problem.

~~~
bevenky
Things word good when the throttle is not pushed on the VM. Also try our
conference calls, you will see the difference :)

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RileyJames
Can someone port the Burner app to Plivo? or add the option to the original
app.

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Josh2600hz
So you guys inked with Voxbone?

