Network Transversal

Low‑latency, cost‑effective, reliable STUN and TURN capabilities for WebRTC, distributed across five continents.

  • Gather Public IP Information

    Device behind NAT asks the Twilio STUN server to inform it what public IP and port it appears as to the rest of the world.

  • Public IP Returned & Relay Option Assigned

    Twilio confirms how the device's local network's NAT has translated the device's private IP, and also issues a public IP TURN media relay option for use in case it's needed.

  • Direct Connectivity Test

    Device shares the candidate IP/port to try direct streaming over by signaling it in SDP. Far end initiates a connectivity test to that IP to establish if peer‑to‑peer is possible.

  • Successful Peer‑to‑Peer Connection

    If devices are able to contact each other directly through the candidate STUN returned, session is set up with direct media.

  • TURN Relay Connection

    If devices are not able to connect to each other directly due to symmetric NAT or other issues, the SDP negotiates use of the offered TURN media relay IP so media relays through the geographically nearest relay point.

Features

NAT Traversal

Twilio provides the behind‑the‑scenes infrastructure so you can focus on building your app, rather than building a global media relay framework to traverse around firewalls.

Global, Scalable STUN

The first step in negotiating the connection for two WebRTC endpoints is STUN (Session Traversal Utilities for NAT), and around 85% of the time that’s all you need to get your media to flow directly. Twilio provides unlimited highly reliable STUN lookups for free, so your peer‑to‑peer calls are always free.

 

TURN Media Relay

When media cannot be routed peer‑to‑peer, Twilio provides you a TURN (Traversal Using Relay NAT) Media Relay point, ensuring your media can be routed through symmetric NATs and other enterprise grade firewall scenarios.

 

Latency Optimized

With relay points deployed in nine different regions around the globe, Geo‑DNS resolution makes sure your media is always routed with the lowest latency possible.

 

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    Cost Effective

    Free usage of STUN, and pay‑as‑you‑go pricing for TURN metered by bandwidth usage ensures using Twilio’s service is cheaper than operating your own.

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    Elastic scale

    Scale on‑demand with no concurrency or total limit on traffic.

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    Easy administration

    View real‑time dashboards of your usage.

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    Built for Multi‑Tenancy

    Using subaccounts, meter your usage by customer or by different apps to get granular usage logs, billing records, and threshold alerts.

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    Standards compliant

    Conforms to RFCs 5389, 5769, 5780, 5766, 6062, 6156, 5245, 5768, 6336, 6544, 5928 over UDP, TCP, TLS, and DTLS.

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    Usage Logs

    View & export historical subaccount usage logs.

Developers that can benefit from Network Traversal Service

If you're building real‑time communications, whether you're using WebRTC, softphones or building your own stack, here's how Twilio helps you build a better service, faster.

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WebRTC Developers

Just provide your auth token and the URL to the Twilio service in your iceServers[] array, and WebRTC will make sure you get the most efficient firewall traversal anywhere in the world. That's all it takes. Leaving you able to focus on building your app, rather than building a global supporting infrastructure behind the scenes.

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Mobile Comms Developers

For developers building your own mobile communications app, whether you're building the media engine on WebRTC code or something else, Network Traversal Service helps developers like you get the app experience to be global as fast as possible.

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Service Providers

Service Providers offering VoIP services often only have equipment in their regional footprint. But users have a tendency of roaming internationally. With Twilio you can ensure your users get the lowest latency, wherever they are - without having to build out infrastructure globally.

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Unified Communications

Unified Communications (UC) deployments offer greater employee productivity with one‑click voice and video calling, screen sharing and more. But without global network traversal options, your remote employees can be left with a bad experience. Network Traversal Service enables you to offer a great experience to all your employees wherever they are located.

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Simple pricing. Global Availability. Elastic Scaling. Free STUN. Better Communication.

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