I've been wondering for a while what the purpose of all the NB band LTE stuff is even for. The going rate is often around 40c/MB in most countries (lower on Twilio by the looks of it, but the same order of magnitude), which seems like there's some very specific high value-per-byte application intended. Some of the technologies people are touting for very long battery life have transmission latencies of 10+ seconds as a trade off, which makes the applications for it even more restricted.
It feels like the result is going to be that literally every device you can purchase will have a always connected LTE lojack attached. Imagine trying to firewall or restrict the network in your business when literally everything has its own backbone, it'll be a complete nightmare.
What’s interesting is a lot of new IoT devices operate or can fallback to a mesh or gateway mode configuration, for example, a group of common sensors that work together. So you’d potentially need to block Bluetooth, ZigBee, WiFi, LTE/GSM, GPS (messaging over GPS) and others to account for different radio technologies.
Shielding by enough to throw any common network off is certainly feasible. Metallized non-opening windows (reflect IR from the sun to save on HVAC), metal plates or thin meshes on the outer walls and either rotating doors or a combination of rf-absorbing walls and a convoluted path to the inside that prevent radio waves from getting in through the door.
I'd assume you can feasibly add 60 dB shielding to a building with that. More is obviously possible, there are conference rooms with advanced shielding of >100dB against industrial espionage. They use fiber optic communication lines to the outside because you want all electrical connections to be very heavily filtered to prevent conducting radio waves through them.
If you have physical access to the device, it's probably cheaper/easier to modify it, replacing the antenna with a load to ground. And if you're going to do that, you could probably negotiate with the provider to sell you a cheaper one with no LTE radios.
I'm probably thinking of larger B2B though, individuals/SB probably won't have the expertise/influence
Twilit has been on an absolute tear over the last 2 years. I wasn’t sure what they would do next to innovate, but their evolution to customer support products, authentication solutions and now this are inspired.
What sets them apart is that, although they are a US company, they think globally. This product is for a global market, just like their app-based push authentication is (the huge market being Europe which has mandated 2FA requirements for finance companies coming into effect). Too many companies build and think about the US as the only market, then try to bring it to other markets which doesn’t always work well.
Counterpoint. While Twilio is interesting, I wonder what percentage of their business is simply multifactor authentication. Having previously used a wide range of companies for SMS connectivity (including multilingual, flash SMS, contact forwarding, and raw PDU features), and implemented VOIP systems with privately owned physical PSTN interface infrastructure, recently I looked at Twilio for inbound VOIP and SMS services across three Asian jurisdictions. It fell far short of our requirements, which were basic (phone and SMS on the same number, one number per country).
By being the default option for MFA and SMS automation, they are an approved and contracted vendor at a zillion companies. Getting a customer to upgrade an existing contract is 100x easier than wooing a new customer. Especially when you have a reputation for being rock solid at your specialty.
>phone and SMS on the same number, one number per country
Was this actually possible if you'd used the local carriers directly? There could be some regulatory reason, like differences between cell and landline numbering plans for billing.
I wish Twilio would figure out some way to accept SMS from short codes. It’s just annoying when I can’t use my VoIP number for 2FA with certain companies (and I realize it’s the companies fault, not the VoIP provider).
This is very cool tech, but it seems like a niche use-case. It's not made for consumers, and the vast majority of IoT devices barely move, let alone between countries.
But, if I were working for a haulage company and was interested in tracking, say, truck location, speed etc across the whole of Europe I could see this being a great way to do it.
PM for the Super SIM here. The problem we're trying to solve here isn't so much that the devices moves between countries, that's somewhat solved, especially in the EU. We want to help companies that deploy devices globally simplify their logistics and supply chain by being able to use a single SIM regardless of the destination of the device.
Will there ever be a consumer offering along these lines? (i.e. i am travelling around and don't want to have to get travel SIMs in every different country I visit).
I didn't get that from the product page. Perhaps it should say "Simplify your logistics supply chain with a single SIM solution regardless of the final destination for your device".
Even if your IoT devices don't move, do you want to deal with 1-3 companies per country you deploy in and follow market changes there, or is that something you're willing to pay someone else to worry about?
You could sell something like 3g internet connected Kindles and without the overhead of some arrangement with a local carriers which Amazon had to set up with their WAN option (which also works globally).
> But, if I were working for a haulage company and was interested in tracking, say, truck location, speed etc across the whole of Europe I could see this being a great way to do it.
If you wanted to do that in the EU you just need a sim card with data from any EU country. EU rules on roaming mean that your sim will work across the EU just as it does from its home country.
I agree this would be a great use case if you're not only tracking in the EU though.
If your routes are restricted to only EU countries, sure! Stray over the Croatian border to Montenegro, for example, and you'll be racking up the bills.
Source: knowingly burnt £10 trying to find somewhere child friendly for lunch.
A niche market in a massive pool could still result in hundreds of millions in sales. Imagine every Tesla that needs to communicate with a server, every RaspPi, heck even iPads or what have you. The potential is pretty huge for a tech like this one so hurray for a more expansive tech!!
That's cool! How do you deal with tracking while it doesn't have GPS signal?
WiFi I suppose, using a mapping from BSSID -> lat/long, like Mozilla Location Services or Combain.
What's the power consumption like from attempting to get a GPS lock? Luggage presumably spends most of it's life indoors. I imagine a WiFi scan uses less power than attempting to acquire a GPS signal.
I'm a hobbyist when it comes to hardware/IOT, I've been working on something similar but for RV's instead of luggage. Much harder constraints when it comes to luggage! RVs have power and room to spare.
Oh, you could put a small generator on the luggage wheels, to charge it a bit while wheeling the luggage around!
Even if your IoT devices don’t move there’s value in putting them on a mobile network. Particularly for security focused devices if you put a SIM and a battery in it then you become resilient to someone cutting the internet line and power before breaking in.
I'm assuming the reason this is positioned as an IOT product is because they need to sell some product based on the network access they are able to negotiate. If they get allowed to use the 911 and voice network, I can imagine the product will shift to consumer pretty fast.
I'm using it in Canada and although data doesn't work (despite their claims) I'm paying one tenth the cost of a local bargain cell plan so I can SMS.
They could move across countries/providers if you think of different use cases: devices on airplanes, boats, weather balloons, long range drones, shipping packages, luggage, etc.
Having a device not tied to a certain provider could allow a shipping container to pass between different owners without needing a proprietary device/plan.
This product is intended for use in IoT devices and not really for 'iPhone use'. A few things to consider:
First of, in the telecom market, there are two ways to get a discount: Buy more SIM cards, or buy more data. Let's say you offer a track-and-trace product, have deployed 1000 GPS trackers, you can easily get the monthly fees and the usage fees down to cents. Same goes for your 'GB-per-month' personal phone subscription, you buy more data, you get it cheaper.
But since roaming will always be costly, even for wholesale carries, SIM card subscriptions that can be used globally are almost always A. expensive, or B intended for IoT (low usage). (GPS, trackers, sensors, feedback buttons, etc). Twilio is focussing on the latter with this SIM.
That brings us to NB-IoT and LTE cat M.
LTE cat M(machine) is basically a stripped down LTE modem, while an NB-IoT modem (or LTE cat Narrowband) is a stripped down LTE cat M modem. Network parameters for these types of connectivity have been tweaked in favour of power consumption at the costs of low bandwidth and high latency. You could say that LTE-M is used for 'MB's per month'-devices (smartwatch for example) and NB-IoT is used for 'bytes per month' devices (is my container full already).
NB-IoT is cheap, extremely power efficient, but is not intended for moving devices.
LTE-M can be used for more demanding applications, like smartwatches, panic buttons (including voice) etc. It can also be used in roaming applications, but that's it. No streaming video etc.
So if you are looking to deploy a large scale IoT application, you want cheap, simple and energy-efficient hardware, which is why you need NB-IoT or LTE-M.
You could go for other technologies like Sigfox or LoRaWan, but they are inferior to NB and LTE-M if you ask me (roaming, availability of network/hardware).
In my view, Twilio does a great job of offering all kinds of telecom services (one stop shop), a common strategy in telecom called 'bundling'. But if you know what you want and where to look, you can get much better rates... Margins are great on this, I can assure you that :)
Hologram seems to offer an api with as much access as twilio's (data usage report, switching between "networks" (what package you buy, which includes certain countries and pricing...) and monthly payment of a fleet of chips. I'm failing to see the added value of twilio, but the more competency the better!
I actually like alternative solutions listed when something is posted on HN that I know nothing about. It's obviously best when the poster does some homework and lists the largest differentiators. I've seen the question "how is this different to X?" used, more often than not, in more of a combative context however where the user defends an alternative and then points negatively at the original.
Just my $0.02 and I"m sure there's a better format that could be used, just not sure what that is exactly :)
I didn't click the links for this one. But often they provide an existing similar service, available today. This is great if the idea shown is so great you need it yesterday, and you hadn't seen it before.
At a first glance the pricing of $0.10 - $0.025 per megabyte in Europe seems somewhat expensive. The wholesale rate is €4.50 per gigabyte or $0.005c per megabyte. I assume the markup covers the cost of maintaining the account and the access to many networks worldwide. Can anyone who is already using GSM data in "IoT" devices comment on how much this compares to what you pay now?
€4.50/GB is absolutely insane for Europe. In Italy you can get 50GB for €7 From Kena or ho.mobile (€0.14/GB) or 50GB for €8 from Illiad (€0.16/GB). All at 4G speeds.
€4.50/GB is the maximum what EU operators are allowed to charge each other for roaming data transit right now, and what an external operator like Twilio would probably have to pay them. Of course in each country you will find operators who offer better deals on their own networks - but Twilio can't reasonably build out their own worldwide mobile network.
Despite this, I can see this service being popular among companies who are willing to pay a bit more per GB to avoid negotiating with operators and getting SIM cards all over the world.
Depends on the country, no? In Spain you get like 1 to 3 GB (depending on the operator) for 7€. And that's with very cheap operators with poor support.
As long as we're discussing pricing, let me plead for an option with $0 monthly fee, even if the data itself is expensive. I have a couple products in mind where mobile data would be a necessary backup, and spending $2/month/device for that won't work for the market I have in mind.
The value Twilio's offering is when you need coverage also outside Europe, in remote countries. Yes, you can get cheaper data plans to cover the EU, but those often come with very high data rates in other areas.
I don't think you can really compare the prices of this kind of low-data, many-sim offer with consumer stuff.
Recently I talked to a national (Portugal) operator who offers M2M SIM cards and their price for national only cards is 0,19€/MB, international one similar to this 0,27€/MB.
Twilio's price is pretty good compared to what they've got.
This looks pretty expensive compared to prices in South East Asia too. You pay between $10 - $30 for a prepared SIM with 10-15 gigs which comes down to $0.001 - $0.003 per megabyte.
As of the completion of the sendgrid acquisition, there is no email verb for twiml. Your only options are to host code on a third-party and call it from Twilio (sendgrid could be that Third party) or write a Twilio function.
But the easiest way to do this, by far, would be a simple email verb in Twiml. No dice so far…
Until they actually ship and make it GA, I reserve the right to call this vapor ware like the rest of the Twilio announcements in the past year. When is VPN for programmable wireless going to ship? Never?
Don't announce a beta unless it's available for public sign up. Or just wait until the product is GA...like a regular company. Otherwise it leads to customer disappointment and disillusionment.
Just pull VPN for programmable wireless from your site. It's clear that it won't launch within a year or two from being "announced".
I just signed in to my twilio account and ordered a "sim starter pack" thinking it was this, but if this is still in closed beta, what did i order? how does super-sim differ from the programmable wireless product?
Readit News
It feels like the result is going to be that literally every device you can purchase will have a always connected LTE lojack attached. Imagine trying to firewall or restrict the network in your business when literally everything has its own backbone, it'll be a complete nightmare.
Is it feasible to use physical RF shielding for devices?
I'm probably thinking of larger B2B though, individuals/SB probably won't have the expertise/influence
What sets them apart is that, although they are a US company, they think globally. This product is for a global market, just like their app-based push authentication is (the huge market being Europe which has mandated 2FA requirements for finance companies coming into effect). Too many companies build and think about the US as the only market, then try to bring it to other markets which doesn’t always work well.
Was this actually possible if you'd used the local carriers directly? There could be some regulatory reason, like differences between cell and landline numbering plans for billing.
But, if I were working for a haulage company and was interested in tracking, say, truck location, speed etc across the whole of Europe I could see this being a great way to do it.
Totally missed what market you were going after.
If you wanted to do that in the EU you just need a sim card with data from any EU country. EU rules on roaming mean that your sim will work across the EU just as it does from its home country. I agree this would be a great use case if you're not only tracking in the EU though.
Source: knowingly burnt £10 trying to find somewhere child friendly for lunch.
I can't get a polish SIM card and use it for an entire year in Germany, for example.
A provider offering unlimited data in the UK can cap your data usage in Belgium or charge e.g. £8 / GB after you use 20GB of data.
A niche market in a massive pool could still result in hundreds of millions in sales. Imagine every Tesla that needs to communicate with a server, every RaspPi, heck even iPads or what have you. The potential is pretty huge for a tech like this one so hurray for a more expansive tech!!
WiFi I suppose, using a mapping from BSSID -> lat/long, like Mozilla Location Services or Combain.
What's the power consumption like from attempting to get a GPS lock? Luggage presumably spends most of it's life indoors. I imagine a WiFi scan uses less power than attempting to acquire a GPS signal.
I'm a hobbyist when it comes to hardware/IOT, I've been working on something similar but for RV's instead of luggage. Much harder constraints when it comes to luggage! RVs have power and room to spare.
Oh, you could put a small generator on the luggage wheels, to charge it a bit while wheeling the luggage around!
Sounds like a fun project.
Yet.
One of the things holding back the development of truly mobile IoT is ease and ubiquity of connectivity. This tries to solve that.
Think of it as Amazon's Whispernet, but with far more penetration.
I'm using it in Canada and although data doesn't work (despite their claims) I'm paying one tenth the cost of a local bargain cell plan so I can SMS.
Having a device not tied to a certain provider could allow a shipping container to pass between different owners without needing a proprietary device/plan.
It's not the cheapest way to do that kind of system, but deployment is an order of magnitude easier. Unbox it and go.
First of, in the telecom market, there are two ways to get a discount: Buy more SIM cards, or buy more data. Let's say you offer a track-and-trace product, have deployed 1000 GPS trackers, you can easily get the monthly fees and the usage fees down to cents. Same goes for your 'GB-per-month' personal phone subscription, you buy more data, you get it cheaper.
But since roaming will always be costly, even for wholesale carries, SIM card subscriptions that can be used globally are almost always A. expensive, or B intended for IoT (low usage). (GPS, trackers, sensors, feedback buttons, etc). Twilio is focussing on the latter with this SIM.
That brings us to NB-IoT and LTE cat M.
LTE cat M(machine) is basically a stripped down LTE modem, while an NB-IoT modem (or LTE cat Narrowband) is a stripped down LTE cat M modem. Network parameters for these types of connectivity have been tweaked in favour of power consumption at the costs of low bandwidth and high latency. You could say that LTE-M is used for 'MB's per month'-devices (smartwatch for example) and NB-IoT is used for 'bytes per month' devices (is my container full already).
NB-IoT is cheap, extremely power efficient, but is not intended for moving devices.
LTE-M can be used for more demanding applications, like smartwatches, panic buttons (including voice) etc. It can also be used in roaming applications, but that's it. No streaming video etc.
So if you are looking to deploy a large scale IoT application, you want cheap, simple and energy-efficient hardware, which is why you need NB-IoT or LTE-M.
You could go for other technologies like Sigfox or LoRaWan, but they are inferior to NB and LTE-M if you ask me (roaming, availability of network/hardware).
In my view, Twilio does a great job of offering all kinds of telecom services (one stop shop), a common strategy in telecom called 'bundling'. But if you know what you want and where to look, you can get much better rates... Margins are great on this, I can assure you that :)
Hologram seems to offer an api with as much access as twilio's (data usage report, switching between "networks" (what package you buy, which includes certain countries and pricing...) and monthly payment of a fleet of chips. I'm failing to see the added value of twilio, but the more competency the better!
[1]: https://hologram.io/ [2]: https://www.eseye.com/
At my current job we use it for gps trackers and IoT devices attached to vehicles, so we don't use voice.
Just my $0.02 and I"m sure there's a better format that could be used, just not sure what that is exactly :)
https://www.kenamobile.it/prodotto/kena-6-99-limited-edition...
https://www.ho-mobile.it/
https://www.iliad.it/offerta-iliad.html
Despite this, I can see this service being popular among companies who are willing to pay a bit more per GB to avoid negotiating with operators and getting SIM cards all over the world.
Recently I talked to a national (Portugal) operator who offers M2M SIM cards and their price for national only cards is 0,19€/MB, international one similar to this 0,27€/MB.
Twilio's price is pretty good compared to what they've got.
I don't want to host offsite code or write complicated functions just to CC: an SMS to my email inbox ...
A <email> twiml verb would be simple and useful.
Edit: SendGrid!
But the easiest way to do this, by far, would be a simple email verb in Twiml. No dice so far…
Just pull VPN for programmable wireless from your site. It's clear that it won't launch within a year or two from being "announced".