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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 l

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.

sb8244 6y ago
I wonder if this will be like Programmable Wireless where you can get cheaper data rates for different levels of commit. Their pricing page says "starts at" and doesn't really go into how they handle bulk discount. If this really is the pricing, then it's definitely IOT focused instead of Programmable Wireless's more general focus.
- matjaxon 6y ago
  Hi there, Matt Jackson from Twilio here. I’m the Product Manager for Super SIM. Glad you're familiar with Programmable Wireless, our other cellular connectivity offering! The “starts at” that we have on our pricing page is for the cheapest priced networks we have in each country. For example, in the UK we have a number of networks that are $0.10 per MB but if you want to use EE it’s $0.20 per MB. With our Network Access Profiles, you can pick exactly which networks you want your Super SIMs to be able to connect to. If EE is the only network that services your area or works best with your hardware and is worth premium to use, you can enable it for your Super SIMs. For now, we just have a pay-as-you-go pricing plan for Super SIM whereas Programmable Wireless has a number of different quota plans that let you commit to a minimum monthly spend per SIM in exchange for discounts as a way for you to self service into lower data costs for hungrier devices. Our pay-as-you-go prices are meant to just get you started. We don’t expect any of our developers to scale up their IoT business at these list prices. Once you’re up and running, you can connect with one of our IoT sales specialists to discuss volume discounts. Promise they don’t bite!
gk1 6y ago
Pretty sure you could set limits or alerts on bandwidth usage to avoid that.
Gamemaster1379 6y ago
Some companies implement IoT by using protocols other than HTTP. For instance, CoAP is one I'm familiar with which can significantly reduce bandwidth consumption.
- robertlagrant 6y ago
  MQTT is common.
matjaxon 6y ago
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 your costs down in case something does go awry.
- tracerbulletx 6y ago
  I really appreciate Twilio's features that limit unexpected costs. I have a personal Twilio account I use to tinker, and to run a simple phone system for my small business, and I would be super worried about doing that if it was like AWS where the best I could get was alerts. Instead Twilio let's me charge my account upfront and disables it if I hit that cap. It's great peace of mind for smaller users.
- AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
  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).
  - matjaxon 6y ago
    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.
    - AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
rcoder 6y ago
If you imagine "IoT" as "a bunch of Linux boxes pushing around multi-MB JSON payloads over fast network pipes" then yeah, this would be a bad deal. For datagram-based protocols like CoAP which are explicitly designed to let you control bandwidth usage down to the packet level this should be fine. 1kB of data (which is honestly large for a normal telemetry or sensor payload) is really cheap, even at $0.10 per MB. Many of the devices and network architectures in this space are made to literally wake up a few times a day and push/pull data, not keep idle connections up and running. Your "runaway loop" would kill the device's battery and cause a bunch of other red flags in such a topology long before it racked up substantial bandwidth charges.
- ProZsolt 6y ago
  CoAP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constrained_Application_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constrained_Application_Protoc...

sb8244 6y ago

I wonder if this will be like Programmable Wireless where you can get cheaper data rates for different levels of commit. Their pricing page says "starts at" and doesn't really go into how they handle bulk discount. If this really is the pricing, then it's definitely IOT focused instead of Programmable Wireless's more general focus.

matjaxon 6y ago
Hi there, Matt Jackson from Twilio here. I’m the Product Manager for Super SIM. Glad you're familiar with Programmable Wireless, our other cellular connectivity offering! The “starts at” that we have on our pricing page is for the cheapest priced networks we have in each country. For example, in the UK we have a number of networks that are $0.10 per MB but if you want to use EE it’s $0.20 per MB. With our Network Access Profiles, you can pick exactly which networks you want your Super SIMs to be able to connect to. If EE is the only network that services your area or works best with your hardware and is worth premium to use, you can enable it for your Super SIMs. For now, we just have a pay-as-you-go pricing plan for Super SIM whereas Programmable Wireless has a number of different quota plans that let you commit to a minimum monthly spend per SIM in exchange for discounts as a way for you to self service into lower data costs for hungrier devices. Our pay-as-you-go prices are meant to just get you started. We don’t expect any of our developers to scale up their IoT business at these list prices. Once you’re up and running, you can connect with one of our IoT sales specialists to discuss volume discounts. Promise they don’t bite!

gk1 6y ago

Pretty sure you could set limits or alerts on bandwidth usage to avoid that.

Gamemaster1379 6y ago

Some companies implement IoT by using protocols other than HTTP. For instance, CoAP is one I'm familiar with which can significantly reduce bandwidth consumption.

robertlagrant 6y ago
MQTT is common.

matjaxon 6y ago

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 your costs down in case something does go awry.

tracerbulletx 6y ago
I really appreciate Twilio's features that limit unexpected costs. I have a personal Twilio account I use to tinker, and to run a simple phone system for my small business, and I would be super worried about doing that if it was like AWS where the best I could get was alerts. Instead Twilio let's me charge my account upfront and disables it if I hit that cap. It's great peace of mind for smaller users.
AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
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).
- matjaxon 6y ago
  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.
  - AdamJacobMuller 6y ago

rcoder 6y ago

If you imagine "IoT" as "a bunch of Linux boxes pushing around multi-MB JSON payloads over fast network pipes" then yeah, this would be a bad deal. For datagram-based protocols like CoAP which are explicitly designed to let you control bandwidth usage down to the packet level this should be fine. 1kB of data (which is honestly large for a normal telemetry or sensor payload) is really cheap, even at $0.10 per MB. Many of the devices and network architectures in this space are made to literally wake up a few times a day and push/pull data, not keep idle connections up and running. Your "runaway loop" would kill the device's battery and cause a bunch of other red flags in such a topology long before it racked up substantial bandwidth charges.

ProZsolt 6y ago
CoAP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constrained_Application_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constrained_Application_Protoc...