At Somleng, one of our biggest customer bases are NGOs. One of the reasons that NGOs choose us is because we work with local carriers directly. This allows us to provide cloud communication services in new markets where it's otherwise unavailable, or with better quality, and a fraction of the cost of our competitors .
Although working with local carriers improves quality and reduces costs, one of the biggest pain points for our customers is actually engaging with and arriving at a commercial agreement with a local carrier. Often our customers want to get something up and running quickly to prove a concept or do a pilot, without engaging with their local carrier.
It turns out that it's actually possible to access the local public switched telephone network (PSTN) without a commercial agreement with a local carrier. All you need is a VoIP gateway and one or more SIM cards. A VoIP gateway has interfaces to both IP networks and the PSTN and handles the bridging between them. One interface can be connected to the Internet and the other to the PSTN, via SIM card(s) inserted into the VoIP gateway. VoIP gateways range in size 1 from to 128 channels or more. The more channels you have the more concurrent calls you can support.
Today we're excited to announce official support for VoIP gateways on Somleng.
With this new feature customers can sign up and connect their VoIP gateway to Somleng by configuring a client gateway connection .
After the connection is configured, customers can programmatically make outbound calls through your VoIP gateway using the REST API , and programmatically control both outbound and inbound calls via TwiML.
Note: Using VoIP gateways is restricted in some countries. We recommend that you check your local laws and regulations before proceeding with this method.
This new feature also opens up new business opportunities for individuals or organizations to provide access to the PSTN in their country via a VoIP gateway that they own or manage. We call this type of user a Network Provider , and like carriers, they can also create customer accounts on Somleng.
Any account that the Network Provider creates, is managed by them and has its own set of REST API credentials and account management interface. A network provider can therefore onboard their own customers, by creating them an account and providing them with PSTN access through their VoIP gateway(s).
This can be combined with our custom domains feature feature resulting in a fully custom-branded experience for your customer.
We don't yet have a way for a network provider to monetize this business flow directly on the Somleng platform, but it's something we will consider if enough users request this feature.
Currently our client gateway feature only supports Programmable Voice, but stay tuned because we're adding SMS support next!