On 10/12/2010 09:27 PM, Benoy Jose wrote: > www.twilio.com <http://www.twilio.com> , www.tropo.com > <http://www.tropo.com> do pretty much the same thing.
Not exactly; these cloud providers cannot be lumped into the same category. They may seem that way to someone not familiar with the industry, but the nuances are rather important. Twilio & such expose very high-level APIs that allow a certain degree of outside application plumbing. This serves a very particular market: developers who are not telecom and telephony experts, and just want to leverage their existing core competencies to add telephony components to their applications and services. For example, using a service like Ifbyphone, a web developer can enhance an online shopping cart to place a call to a customer-provided telephone provider upon order submission and ask them to enter a PIN via TTS to confirm that it is a real person, through a REST type API. They can do all this without having to learn and deploy Asterisk, procure SIP trunks or TDM circuits, and generally venture outside of their core business domain. Cloudvox does that too, but Cloudvox offers a much broader array of developer-friendly interfaces, including native AGI and AMI. The original poster asked about moving his existing Asterisk setup "into the cloud," presumably without a loss of functionality or feature depth. Troy's response about Cloudvox was much more appropriate to the original poster's question than Twilio or Tropo. > Both of them seem to be cheaper than cloudvox. What I dont understand > is the ridiculous price for SMS on all three platforms 2-3c a message. > Even the monster cell phone networks like AT & T and verizon are cheaper. Originating SMSs on a large scale via IP is a very expensive business that subjects you to a small, secretive oligopoly/mafia of providers. Becoming an SMSC yourself just has a high cost basis, too, that is a large fixed cost relative to the volumes of cell carriers. It's not arbitrary pricing; I think these guys would love to drop it. -- Alex Balashov - Principal Evariste Systems LLC 1170 Peachtree Street 12th Floor, Suite 1200 Atlanta, GA 30309 Tel: +1-678-954-0670 Fax: +1-404-961-1892 Web: http://www.evaristesys.com/ -- _____________________________________________________________________ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- asterisk-biz mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-biz
