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I seem to have missed it in the article and from reading the comments here, but what exactly is Uber's reason for moving away from Twilio? Are they building th

I seem to have missed it in the article and from reading the comments here, but what exactly is Uber's reason for moving away from Twilio? Are they building their own comms & SMS infrastructure in house? Are they big enough now to work out bulk deals with Telcos in each country? Are they spreading their load across multiple comms providers? In any case, I would have thought the move would have been planned well ahead, giving Twilio time and notice to try and entice other huge customers, possibly even Uber's rivals to step in and take up the capacity?

busterarm 10y ago
Ex-phone company employee and someone who set up his own personal voip service (Asterix server) with DID & Termination for dirtcheap "cell phone" service here: It's such an easy thing to do, but requires a lot of coordinated effort to do correctly. A company of Uber's size definitely should be in-housing this kind of operation and so should anyone with budget to hire engineers and a competent ops team. Heck, the hedge fund I worked at had a dedicated telephony team. It's not sexy technology, so nobody wants to do it and that's where Twilio makes all of their money. Expensive, but convenient.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- pbreit 10y ago
  I would disagree. Twilio should be able to do it better and less expensively than Uber. The only think I can think of is Twilio refused to lower its prices or there's a glaring deficiency that Twilio is unable or unwilling to fix.
  - busterarm 10y ago
    Really? Twilio pulled in ~$277 million last year. Uber was supposedly 12% of that. You're saying it would have cost Uber more than $33 million and change to do their telephony? I strongly doubt that. Uber doesn't need all of Twilio's features. They can build out just what they need much cheaper. This is the same situation people find themselves in with AWS, etc. It's less expensive _initially_. There's a point where this becomes not the case.
    - mathattack 10y ago
      Quite possibly time and attention too. Tech execs start by building. ("Why optimize on building my own tech when I can start quickly using someone else's. Let me worry about product/market fit") Over time the drive to optimize takes over, especially as companies look to show better profitability.
    - MarkMc 10y ago
      Twilio should be offering Uber a price which is just below the minimum it would take for Uber to build it themselves. Also, Uber management should be focused on other things which are much more important for the future of the company, like the user experience, or self-driving cars, or machine-learning algorithms to predict future traffic. Uber should not be focused on pushing down costs because the opportunity cost of losing focus is huge. It reminds me of this epic rant from Bill Gates: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/kaiaxford/2008/06/27/why-we-and-you-will-miss-billg/ https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/kaiaxford/2008/06/27/why... It's a funny story, but while Bill was focused details about a minor product he was missing the opportunity to develop a search engine like Google, or mobile devices like Apple.
    - pbreit 10y ago
      Well, here's what I actually wrote: "Twilio should be able to do it better and less expensively than Uber. The only think I can think of is Twilio refused to lower its prices or there's a glaring deficiency that Twilio is unable or unwilling to fix."
- tbrock 10y ago
  Where/how can one learn to do this on their own?
jondubois 10y ago
It's surprising that telecommunications and Internet still haven't fully merged into a single service. These days I don't even buy phone credit anymore. I just make calls on my phone using Skype - It's so much cheaper.
- busterarm 10y ago
  The folks old/experienced enough to know better are basically all retired and for various reasons don't care. On the phone side of things, they generally all retired with great pensions/retirement plans and never had to get too deep in the computer side of things. On the computer side of things, their packet-switched networks had different enough requirements from circuit-switched that it evolved separately and who wanted to deal with all that regulation anyway? There's still a fair bit of overlap between internet routing protocols and telephone routing (and even postal routing). Now that content and deliverability requirements have changed for Internet users, we're having to solve old problems again and the infrastructure is becoming more the same. All the recent work and talk about new transport protocols for VoIP? Guess what... Just about all of your TelCos basically had voip in their infrastructure back in the mid-90s and nobody noticed the difference. Your PSTN lines connected to your local and and they connected to each other via IP to share lines (and massively save costs). Look up FXO/FXS gateways if you're interested. Some of you have this in your homes on a small scale.
tyingq 10y ago
Is Twilio really leveraging low-level connectivity though, getting the cost benefit of "direct to telco"? If I search around, it sounds like they use bandwidth.com as their upstream provider. Bandwidth.com released their own api, with lower pricing: http://dev.bandwidth.com/ http://dev.bandwidth.com/ I also don't see much high level difference between Twilio and their other competitors like Plivo, Nexmo, etc. Especially for simple things like SMS, it would seem to make sense for large users to have a thin shim layer that lets them load balance across providers. Negotiation would be pretty easy when you can just turn the dial to show that you're serious. This field feels very close to being a commodity.
- lawrenceyan 10y ago
  Twilio has a better consumer facing package. And it's in a really good place right now with brand name. If they leverage this well, they should be able to cement the market with enterprise just as well as they've done with smaller companies.

busterarm 10y ago

Ex-phone company employee and someone who set up his own personal voip service (Asterix server) with DID & Termination for dirtcheap "cell phone" service here: It's such an easy thing to do, but requires a lot of coordinated effort to do correctly. A company of Uber's size definitely should be in-housing this kind of operation and so should anyone with budget to hire engineers and a competent ops team. Heck, the hedge fund I worked at had a dedicated telephony team. It's not sexy technology, so nobody wants to do it and that's where Twilio makes all of their money. Expensive, but convenient.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
pbreit 10y ago
I would disagree. Twilio should be able to do it better and less expensively than Uber. The only think I can think of is Twilio refused to lower its prices or there's a glaring deficiency that Twilio is unable or unwilling to fix.
- busterarm 10y ago
  Really? Twilio pulled in ~$277 million last year. Uber was supposedly 12% of that. You're saying it would have cost Uber more than $33 million and change to do their telephony? I strongly doubt that. Uber doesn't need all of Twilio's features. They can build out just what they need much cheaper. This is the same situation people find themselves in with AWS, etc. It's less expensive _initially_. There's a point where this becomes not the case.
  - mathattack 10y ago
    Quite possibly time and attention too. Tech execs start by building. ("Why optimize on building my own tech when I can start quickly using someone else's. Let me worry about product/market fit") Over time the drive to optimize takes over, especially as companies look to show better profitability.
  - MarkMc 10y ago
    Twilio should be offering Uber a price which is just below the minimum it would take for Uber to build it themselves. Also, Uber management should be focused on other things which are much more important for the future of the company, like the user experience, or self-driving cars, or machine-learning algorithms to predict future traffic. Uber should not be focused on pushing down costs because the opportunity cost of losing focus is huge. It reminds me of this epic rant from Bill Gates: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/kaiaxford/2008/06/27/why-we-and-you-will-miss-billg/ https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/kaiaxford/2008/06/27/why... It's a funny story, but while Bill was focused details about a minor product he was missing the opportunity to develop a search engine like Google, or mobile devices like Apple.
  - pbreit 10y ago
    Well, here's what I actually wrote: "Twilio should be able to do it better and less expensively than Uber. The only think I can think of is Twilio refused to lower its prices or there's a glaring deficiency that Twilio is unable or unwilling to fix."
tbrock 10y ago
Where/how can one learn to do this on their own?

jondubois 10y ago

It's surprising that telecommunications and Internet still haven't fully merged into a single service. These days I don't even buy phone credit anymore. I just make calls on my phone using Skype - It's so much cheaper.

busterarm 10y ago
The folks old/experienced enough to know better are basically all retired and for various reasons don't care. On the phone side of things, they generally all retired with great pensions/retirement plans and never had to get too deep in the computer side of things. On the computer side of things, their packet-switched networks had different enough requirements from circuit-switched that it evolved separately and who wanted to deal with all that regulation anyway? There's still a fair bit of overlap between internet routing protocols and telephone routing (and even postal routing). Now that content and deliverability requirements have changed for Internet users, we're having to solve old problems again and the infrastructure is becoming more the same. All the recent work and talk about new transport protocols for VoIP? Guess what... Just about all of your TelCos basically had voip in their infrastructure back in the mid-90s and nobody noticed the difference. Your PSTN lines connected to your local and and they connected to each other via IP to share lines (and massively save costs). Look up FXO/FXS gateways if you're interested. Some of you have this in your homes on a small scale.

tyingq 10y ago

Is Twilio really leveraging low-level connectivity though, getting the cost benefit of "direct to telco"? If I search around, it sounds like they use bandwidth.com as their upstream provider. Bandwidth.com released their own api, with lower pricing: http://dev.bandwidth.com/ http://dev.bandwidth.com/ I also don't see much high level difference between Twilio and their other competitors like Plivo, Nexmo, etc. Especially for simple things like SMS, it would seem to make sense for large users to have a thin shim layer that lets them load balance across providers. Negotiation would be pretty easy when you can just turn the dial to show that you're serious. This field feels very close to being a commodity.

lawrenceyan 10y ago
Twilio has a better consumer facing package. And it's in a really good place right now with brand name. If they leverage this well, they should be able to cement the market with enterprise just as well as they've done with smaller companies.