Comments on: With Twilio’s help, AT&T opens up SMS, voice to developers

By: Houssam Larab

Houssam Larab — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 16:08:35 +0000

I read this article with quite a bit of interest and in follow-up research I haven’t been able to find any enduring reference by either Twilio or AT&T to a partnership let alone a reseller arrangement between the two.

In fact a week ago AT&T took down their ACS description with Twilio only to repost yesterday a complete rewrite that does away with any reference to a Twilio partnership. In light of this, your article seems entirely confusing at best, purposely misleading at worst. Even Twilio re-wrote their blogpost on the subject (http://www.twilio.com/blog/2012/09/new-deal-with-att.html). I would be grateful if you could publish an update that would shed some light on the mystery of this partnership that never was since, clearly, something is not right.

By: Kevin Fitchard

Kevin Fitchard — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 14:39:54 +0000

Hi Tsahi.

Well you could also argue that the carriers are responsible for that failure of standards. Sure, the operators were pissed that WAC was moving so slow, but ultimately it was a carrier initiative. If they cooperated they could have sped up the process.

By: Tsahi Levent-Levi

Tsahi Levent-Levi — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 09:41:00 +0000

This is rather interesting.
It seems like the carriers themselves aren’t happy with their own slow standardization efforts such as WAC and OneAPI and are now resorting to adopting successful startup API aggregators to achieve the same end state.
Funny how the proprietary is becoming the new standard.

By: Stephen Blum

Stephen Blum — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 19:15:54 +0000

There is a fragmentation between carriers and providers for simple development with SMS and Voice. Twilio has defragmented the complexity, making telephony programming approachable. I feel that we will begin to see a concentration on cross-carrier platforms like PubNub (Global Cross-Carrier Signaling) and Twilio (Telephony) with big Telcos like AT&T, Verizon and more. The China Government has two completely separate Internets; and it is hard to bridge communication between thew two Internets unless you are using tech like PubNub which can target all devices anywhere on Earth as long as it has a TCP/IP address. Traditionally large companies like AT&T have kept secret their technologies for internal use only. The trend here is in exposing the capabilities of AT&T to businesses for simple integration opportunities. Check out a leading VoIP article http://finance.yahoo.com/news/rebtel-chooses-pubnub-pulse-speed-130000674.html speaking about Cloud Infrastructure bringing real-time presence functionality to everyone, everywhere, on any device and any provider network.