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.
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.
It's usually possible to move phone numbers between providers within the same country. In the past, phone number prefixes were used by telcos to route the calls meaning that it was very difficult to change your provider and keep your number. Great for the incumbent, not for customers and competitors.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
"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.
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.
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.
Jdangu, glad you mentioned that. We already do. Our focus is not just reselling minutes. We allow you to bring your own carriers if you already relationships, and we support SIP if that matters.
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.
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.
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.
