Anyone using twilio SIP trunk?

Twilios elastic sip trunk appears to allow any number of simultaneous calls you want, and just bills per minute at very low rates (like .007 instead of most providers who are at around .02 per min)

Whats the catch? I havent found any catch yet, but then why have i never heard of anyone using twilio?

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I have a customer that’s using Twilio. I don’t understand how they do it, but he’s happy as a clam.

raises hand
Twilio works great. There are some caveats that some SIP Trunk providers offer that Twilio doesn’t.
Twilio doesn’t support T.38 for faxing, cannot update carrier CNAM, can’t purchase international DIDs everywhere (although they do offer several major countries), carrier mix is mostly Level3 and Bandwidth behind the scenes (not necessarily a bad thing, but Level3 has has issues time to time), free support is via email only with 24 hour response time (for non critical tickets).

If you are ok with that, then they are great. Stable, flat pricing, as many channels of voice as you need, e911, easy LNP port in and port out, call recording from the carrier (which is nice if you are trying to determine if an endpoint or PBX is having issues), trace logs (wireshark) for diags, etc.

They aren’t the least expensive for North America, and their international rates aren’t the cheapest either… but it’s predictable, lower cost than most other SIP providers, and their are no minimums… when i was introduced to them I just signed up for a trial, put a few dollars in for credits and I was off to the races.
They also offer other programmable services (video, SMS, cellular).

Thanks! faxing would be a big issue for most of my clients. I am still impressed with what appears to be ‘unlimited trunks’/unlimited simultaneous calls where you only pay per minute.

Are you able to update CNAM another way?

unfortunately no…
it’s ok of course if you port in a number where the CNAM is correctly showing.
Just if you need to update it or change it, you can’t.

This third party site (ListYourself.net) allows you to update 411-directory and they claim that other carriers use their database to populate CNAM… but I’m not sure in practice how realistic or reliable this is… I haven’t really tried it much. http://www.listyourself.net/WhitePaperWhyCNAMDoesNotWork.jsp

We use Twilio for outgoing calls. Works really great, no issues at all.

Using twilio both inbound and outbound… Seems to be working well so far… We did have an issue where twilio’s carrier wasn’t putting the + in front of the number for an entire area code… Which caused us a lot of problems because everyone was telling us it was our issue… Until we finally pushed back and showed it was on their end… They eventually called the carrier and got it fixed… Other than that 1 area code, it’s been working fairly well.

Sent you a message.

I havent seen anyone share their settings for twilio and freepbx13 (and the firewall yet). I am just starting to put this together for myself so it would be willing to put that all out there…

I basically setup freepbx and twilio using the instructions from this document

It worked beautifully, other than that minor issue i had with the actual carrier, but once twilio looked into it, and the carrier fixed it, we were golden… It took a few tried before they listened to me… So that was a tad frustrating. They kept telling me I wasn’t setup correctly and the whole time it was an issue on their end.

We still use twilio, we also use telnyx. Probably going to move everything to telnyx, simply because they have better number management functionality (ie: find 10 consecutive numbers for a new office)… and the pricing is the same… performance and lines are basically the same also.

My settings for outgoing are… incoming is basically blank…

host=accountname.pstn.twilio.com
username=username
secret=password
type=peer

As for the firewall, I just setup according to a youtube video… I can’t recall the exact one… but if you search for freepbx 101, a guy that runs the company cross talk solutions does a really good job of expolaining step by step hoe to get up and running… That might be your best bet…

I’m open to answering any questions you have, but you should know I am very novice at this.

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Thanks, in the end I think I just had to start adding a + to all dial patterns. That and some weird changes to context in sip configuration.

I noticed after finally getting it working that they dont bill in 6 second increments. I was going to use them for outbound and I needed the call recording for a specific customer use case.

I was really bummed when I watched the call logs and so the round-up per minute billing. I figure a 7 to 10% savings on 6 second billing. That being said the rates are better than the voip.ms and flowroutes out there. So its probably a wash in the end.

Check out telnyx.com … they bill by 6 second increments for most stuff… I hadn’t looked at that yet as we’re still in testing mode and mostly running telnyx anyway… And though you’re looking at outbound, telnyx also has a flat rate $12 inbound plan also, which is kinda nice… definitely worth a look.

I have T38 Faxing working on my Twilio trunk, however the statement on Twilio not supporting CNAM remains true:

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Just curious… how did you get t.38 working?
Because Twilio still states they don’t support it:

I can’t make much sense of their outbound calling rates.

They are between $0.0070 and $0.2500 a minute depending on which one of their 5 calling “zones” you are calling into.
Looking at their termination prices sheet, it’s not clear to me how these zones are differentiated from one another hence I don’t know what I would be getting into pricing wise.
https://www.twilio.com/pricing/csv/sip-trunking-termination

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Did you figure out the inbound caller ID issue with twilio. I also just get the phone number string - not the descriptive text. When I go to www.twilio.com/lookup, they clearly have the information in their system but it just doesnt make it to my system. My previous trunk provider caller ID worked perfectly with settings as they are.

Tech support said this. Im not sure with to do with it:
Thanks for checking with us. In order for you to receive a certain caller ID for the calls coming in first of all you need to make sure as to what the caller ID looks like here: https://www.twilio.com/lookup

Basically, Twilio passes the caller ID it receives in Trunking setup so if the INVITE coming into your PBX via Twilio has a P-Asserted-Identity values as
"2482161534" sip:[email protected]:5060
the display will come up as is on the receiving phone.

In order to toggle it or change the callerID, my recommendation would be to review the configuration on the PBX and the end-users phones to ensure that the caller ID is being properly passed and displayed.

The PBX should have a setting to force a CallerID that will then be displayed to end users.

<RANT>

Why would anyone use Twilio?

They are not price competitive and they seem to go out of their way to make this harder than it needs to be. With options like SipStation, Voip Innocations, and Alcazar Networks available, why is everyone so intent on making their lives miserable.

</RANT>

Sorry - momentary loss of control…

Why compare apples and oranges? The providers you mentioned are cost effective SIP trunks at a certain volume. Twilio is an application platform that happens to offer SIP trunking.

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Because all three of them provide both apples and oranges (retail and wholesale SIP), where twilio is clearly lemons only. :wink:

@cynjut you don’t like Twilio, but don’t give any good reason why…? How is pricing better at SIPStation? (It’s not)

Paying per minute at Twilio with unlimited simultaneous calls is waaay cheaper and more flexible in my experience whether talking about 1 phone line or 100

some of my smallest clients with 3-5 employees, 3-5 DIDs are paying $10-15/month for their entire phone bill every month. Compare that to $50/phone line at Comcast, $25/line at SIPStation, I’m not sure where you are getting that it is expensive or something?

Also its easy to configure Twilio and FreePBX, Twilio and FusionPBX etc … just follow the guide on their website. Nothing miserable about it

Another reason I chose Twilio is because of it’s interface which is multi-tenant. I moved away from Flowroute because I had to have a separate login for each of my customers, but with Twilio I have them all listed as Sub Accounts, and I’m able to give access to my clients while still seeing all of them from my account, a huge benefit

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They are talking about your CID Number, and how to change that

But you want to change your CID description right? Twilio doesn’t support that.