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Comment by songzme | Hacker News Reader

Great read, this spiraled me down a rabbit hole of research, posting it here in case someone has the same questions:

How phone numbers / phones work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZsajM6M3UY

How to buy a block of phone numbers: https://www.siptrunk.com/2015/12/how-to-find-did-number-bloc...

I'm trying to do a thought exercise on how I might approach building a Twilio side project, but after I buy phone numbers from sipTrunk, I wouldn't know how to connect it to sim cards.

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Depending on what you want your project to do, you don't need to connect a phone number to a SIM card. Twilio does that for you, letting you use their API to send and receive SMS (text) messages with other phone numbers. It's the recipient's phone number, not your Twilio one, that's connected to a SIM card.

What the linked post here talks about is using a device that's basically a mobile phone in a USB stick form factor to send and receive SMS like you'd do on a mobile phone. You buy a SIM, insert it into the device, and start texting. That's the other side of what your Twilio project would do.

Oops I reread my statement and I think I miscommunicated. I meant I'm trying to figure out how I might build Twilio (the product). OP's article shows how to send/receive texts (check). I don't know how Twilio buys numbers, and how I might build a service that buys numbers for people.

I don't know either, but suspect that something like this is involved: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/128-Slots-SIMBANK-rem...

Edit: Or https://www.qosmotec.com/ireg-test-automation-remote-ues-cen...

https://www.aaisp.net.uk/telecoms-sip2sim.html ?

this might be interesting for you: https://jmp.chat/

>"JMP gives you a Canadian or US phone number that is yours to keep. JMP allows you to send and receive text messages and picture messages using your Jabber client, with calls delivered to voicemail (including a text transcription) by default. "

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