Any plans to support non Twilio SMS providers for Indian market
This thread has been locked for further replies. You can start a new thread to share your ideas or ask questions.
Are their any plans to support non-Twilio SMS providers. We are not looking to replace the entire hotspot service just the REST part where we get an OTP sent to users for authentication. The reason is Twilio's ever increasing charges in our country India (We understand this is a problem at Indian operator side, but that is not enough to resolve the issue for customers)
Twilio Charges for SMS messaging in US are 0.0079$ per SMS while that for India are 0.0682$ per SMS or nearly 9 times lesser if the site in US. In last 2-3 years, India SMS rates have climbed from a practical 0.01$ to almost 0.07$ per SMS. at 0.01$ itself the SMS rates were way more than what local providers offer, but when you increase it 7 times, it becomes totally absurd
We will have to abandon SMS authentication if things continue at this rate. Another option is for Twilio to deploy their servers in India.
@APRC-P3-Tel : I understand that an external Portal server is ONE feasible way of solving this issue, but we would have to end up replicating all the functionality and flexibility that Tp-Link has put into their default Omada internal portal server. Plus we would have to maintain a new piece of software (self developed or 3rd party provided). For non-technology aware customers this may be troublesome. So we would prefer that Tp-Link provide some solution.
We have noticed that the interworking of some other services like Plivo is very similar to Twilio, and integrating them may not be a very big change either at the front end or back end of the Tp-Link Omada default internal portal server. For eg., here is a python code comparison (java codes will be similar):
Another feasible option is if Tp-Link can ask Twilio to put their servers in India and then rationalize the tariff (it will benefit their other SMS customers also). In my reading it looks like Plivo has servers in India and their rates are more rational for outbound SMS:
Tpl-link can also consider if they want to release an open source implementation of an external portal server with SMS authentication support or point to some FOSS solution that can work.