When the network is the problem, what’s the solution?

Most of us have experienced the annoying effects of degraded video conferencing quality: audio becomes robotic and choppy while video turns into a sequence of blurry pictures. This is frustrating for end-users who tend to complain to application developers and platform providers asking for a solution. However, experience shows that most of the time, what causes these problems is the network access of the end users themselves. Notably, crappy wifi.

Wireless links are subject to so many different types of interference that can cause packet loss that it’s impossible to control. Worse, the use of shared access mechanisms split the available bandwidth amongst channels and may cause bitrate drops in crowded areas. Even with wired ethernet, routers and firewalls might get congested causing jitter, latency and packet loss. Worst of all, free, coffee shop wifi.

When video conferencing, all these problems …

Before eLearning, a student needed to commute across town or even move to a different country to get a quality education. Improvements in technology, especially in WebRTC, has taken the hassle out of connecting students with great teachers and schools.

I’m Alex from LearnCube, virtual classroom software that specializes in helping language-learning and academic tutoring companies teach online.

When we started four years ago, we made a bet that WebRTC would be the video technology of the future. Users much prefer the seamless experience of not having to download an external app or software. The quality has been getting better every year and it’s already superior to many many established video-conferencing providers.

We became a Twilio customer for Programmable Video in late 2017 after learning that Twilio had acquired Kurento. What we found was a quality video platform to embed in our virtual classroom software at an affordable …

• Prevent messages from being unnecessarily concatenated
• Automatic translation of Unicode to equivalent GSM7/ASCII characters
• Available now

In the past, the only way to check whether a message contained an inadvertent Unicode character was to paste the text into a tool that tells you how we will encode your message or send a test message and check for segments in your logs, which adds an extra step to your development lifecycle.

Now with the new Smart Encoding feature for Copilot, Twilio will automatically translate Unicode characters into GSM7/ASCII characters for you if there are GSM7/ASCII alternatives and no characters that can’t be converted in the message, e.g. emoji or language ba …

If you need to send messages fast, your Twilio Short Code is the perfect vehicle – and we just gave it some more horsepower. Now you can send 100 messages per second (MPS) by default in the US, Canada, and the UK up from 30 MPS.

When to use a Short Code vs. Long Code?

In the US, long codes aren’t meant for high-volume messaging. To ensure you stay within compliance, Twilio automatically queues your outbound messages, sending them to the carriers at 1 MPS per long code in the US. This can be a real drag if your content is time sensitive and/or high volume, like warning a community about a school closing or promoting a “one day sale”. Your users may end up waiting around for those alerts unless you have enough long codes to handle the throughput. So if you’re sending more than a few hundred messages …

There’s nothing worse than a delayed text message. Whether it’s a notification that your car arrived, a two-factor-authentication code or a response to a chat, it needs to arrive on time.

Getting a message from point A to point B quickly is not a one-size-fits-all operation. After sending billions of text messages around the world, we learned delivery varies by geography, mobile operator, use case, and, for some businesses, the actual content of the message.

There are many different routes that your message can take through the telecom ecosystem to reach the handset. Surprisingly – or at least it was initially to me – telecom routes don’t always deliver messages with the same success, they change over time.

Today, Twilio announces a new Twilio Message Feedback API that enables you to programmatically report back to Twilio critical deliverability information. Actions that indicate a message was received can then be used …