[asterisk-biz] Asterisk Server + Origination & Termination

[Alex Balashov]

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
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