
Twilio ramps up mobile play with programmable SIMs for IoT, handsets with T-Mo - coloneltcb
http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/24/twilio-ramps-up-mobile-play-with-programmable-sims-for-iot-and-handsets-with-t-mobile/?ncid=rss
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rsync
Is anyone else thinking of porting their mobile number to Twilio and setting
up their own, personalized google voice using the twilio API ?

This occurred to me when I decided that what I wanted my phone to do was ring
forever if I didn't answer. It turns out, twilio gives you a way to do this:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22410430/twilio-
respond-t...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22410430/twilio-respond-to-
incoming-call-by-ringing-forever)

... and there are a lot of other very interesting things you could do:

[https://www.twilio.com/blog/2013/03/building-beyond-
google-v...](https://www.twilio.com/blog/2013/03/building-beyond-google-voice-
with-twilio.html)

~~~
saarons
So I've actually been doing this in various forms for the past few years. Mind
you I actually chose to go with Plivo (a competitor) instead of Twilio, a
decision I'm still thinking about to this day (MMS primarily). The way it
works for me is I actually use Slack as the interface to my contacts. Each
person is their own private slack room. I use it just like any other, I send
them slack messages and it sends them a SMS and vice-versa. So far it's been
pretty great, I get to take advantage of all of Slack's clients and I just
write the code that transits the messages using the Slack API. What's really
fun is that I'm starting to allow slash commands so that my friends can use
some of them in the rooms with me and we can have sort of a shared chat-bot
experience over regular SMS.

If anybody is interested in seeing the code, some parts of it are already open
source[1]. The most interesting piece is the dialer, as someone in the thread
pointed out, setting the caller ID on the outbound is tricky. On Android there
are actually APIs that can intercept outbound calls, manipulate the number,
and make the call to my gateway and then input the actual number as DTMF codes
followed by a terminator. It doesn't always work but in 95% of cases I've
never had a problem.

[1]: [https://github.com/saarons/ward](https://github.com/saarons/ward)

~~~
sprice
This is a clever way to handle the client. I like it.

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tlrobinson
Good timing for Pebble Core?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11762535](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11762535)

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agildehaus
The pricing seems rather outrageous. Is it not fair to compare with, say,
Google Fi at $10/gig?

~~~
pbrumm
with google fi you can also order extra data sim's with no monthly fee. And
they use your phone's $10/gb plan.

~~~
toomuchtodo
You can get a bucket of data to use across multiple data devices with Google
Fi?

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Animats
Plug: if you're at the Clockwork Alchemy Steampunk Convention at the
Doubletree Hotel in San Jose this weekend, check out the Telegraph Office.[1]
That uses Twilio for SMS handling.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F_hhp4nCHE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F_hhp4nCHE)

~~~
Cub3
I like the Telegraph Office idea, but the flashing in that video made my eyes
hurt pretty quickly

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beardicus
I paste this in every time there's talk about cheap data SIMs for IoT stuff:

[https://www.truphone.com/us/consumer/sim/](https://www.truphone.com/us/consumer/sim/)

I'd love to hear other people's experiences, but basically: $0 a month per
SIM, $0.09 per MB. Since there's no monthly fee, you're supposed to use a
certain amount of credit per month or they'll charge you a small fee to keep
your number active, but mine has been unused for maybe six months with zero
charges still. The SIM costs $30, but half of that is service credit.

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rememberlenny
Any idea where/when we can get one?

~~~
Abundnce10
_Twilio says the service will be available broadly in Q4, 2016._

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jgalt212
Programmable SIMs for the IoT?

Now we are definitely going to run out of phone numbers.

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dontscale
Does anyone else wonder whether or not the explosion of solar panel
telemarketing calls are a consequence of how easy Twilio makes it to set up
call center operations and change in and out of numbers?

~~~
toast0
Twilio requires that you call from either a number you have in their system,
or a number you've verified ownership of. That's a higher bar than a lot of
voip providers -- i've gotten many calls from numbers that don't even fit in
the dialing plan.

~~~
dontscale
From what I remember, you can change in and out of phone numbers like with
Google voice - and there are a ton of them. I don't know if that matters for
spammy calls - I don't know anything about that domain.

Twilio allows you to automate calls programmatically, and what a lot of the
callers do is wait for you to say hello - they're robo dialers. I wonder how
much Twilio has influenced that (unknowingly or deliberately)

~~~
Gnewt
This is very easy and cheap to implement with Asterisk and a no-name VoIP
provider. I've done some messing around with phones in the past and I would
expect that Twilio has little/no effect on this space -- the barriers to being
spammy with Twilio are higher than with Asterisk and another VoIP provider.

