Lessons in CPaaS Leadership: Reliability Rules

Successful businesses maintain reliable communication with their customers. That doesn’t necessarily mean more communication, as anyone who’s opted out of too-frequent marketing emails would agree. It means that important information from the company gets to its customers, and vice versa.

To foster reliable communications, businesses need a reliable communications platform. That’s why Plivo puts so much effort into maintaining high deliverability and reliability for its communications platform as a service (CPaaS).

It starts with our internal infrastructure. Plivo is hosted on a cloud platform with high availability built in. We guarantee 99.99% uptime.

Messages and network traffic then go out over redundant links to the carriers in our network. We connect directly with Tier 1 telecom network operators in more than 100 countries, and have direct connectivity with carriers in more than 190 countries overall. Having those direct relationships means fewer interconnections and less chance of packets being dropped or misrouted.

We have seven points of presence (PoP) strategically located near high-traffic internet exchange points (IXP) on five continents, which helps us deliver sub-50-millisecond connections to carriers to give customers the best voice call experience. We staff geographically distributed network operations centers (NOC) in Austin, Texas, and Bangalore, India, to deliver round-the-clock support from trained engineers. All of which is to say that Plivo builds in high performance along with reliability. 

Thanks to our investment in our global network, we ensure that customers’ messages take the fastest, most reliable routes. By doing that we provide low latency for both SMS and voice traffic and clearer voice calls. How do we know what routes are reliable? By getting constant feedback. Plivo sets up company-owned handsets as test nodes across all the countries we serve, using real phone numbers from carriers local to each region. We send messages to these test nodes and receive data back about voice and SMS deliverability and delivery speed. If we encounter issues, we dynamically and automatically reroute traffic to better-performing carriers.

Is all that effort working? According to our customers, yes. Here’s a sample of comments they’ve left in G2 reviews:

• If you are looking for a simple and robust SMS API both for international or local use, Plivo is by far the most affordable and reliable choice. — Kaleab t
• Having tried other vendors, we found Plivo to be easy and customisable, not to mention super reliable too. — Kaushik K
• Their service is very reliable… even during events like hurricane Harvey (I live in Houston) their service was there 100% on-line for me and my clients. — Jorge Eliecer V
• If you’re looking for a reliable alternative to the likes of Twilio, look no further. It’s simple to use, reliable, with plenty of features. — Tommy N

Plivo’s voice and SMS APIs let businesses incorporate phone calls and send and receive SMS messages within their own applications. Nowadays a reliable CPaaS makes more sense than building similar functionality in-house. No business should have to buy and maintain expensive equipment, handle carrier relationships, or hire additional developers to write and maintain their communication platform software. 

Reliability is one of the factors, along with a strong carrier network and consultative customer support, that make Plivo stand out among cloud communications platforms, and that we’re highlighting in this post in our Lessons in CPaaS Leadership blog series. For a CPaaS, reliability isn’t something you build into your infrastructure and then ignore. It’s a constant process of checking routes and testing deliverability, which all goes on behind the scenes out of view of users. Plivo tries to make it look easy so you can rest assured that your messages will get through, because we’re not satisfied until you connect with your customers.

First, though, connect with us. Sign up for a free trial — it takes only five minutes.