State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

Over the last year or so I’ve seen Cloud computing become very popular. Articles about clouds are everywhere: websites, blogs, magazines, twitter. All kinds of new services are being offered in the cloud. Of course Telecom related services are coming too. Lets start with Twilio, which lets web developers integrate telephony services without having to know the telephony related programming or to mess with the telephony infrastructure.

Twilio provides an in-cloud API for voice communications using web technologies. Everything you need in just 5 API building blocks. Reduce the cost of developing, deploying and managing voice apps by paying for capacity when you need it, not before. You can build sales automation systems, order inquiry lines, CRM solutions, call routing apps, phone trees, appointment reminders, custom voicemail apps, and a whole lot more. Twilio can receive calls from or place calls to any phone with a phone number, such as land lines, cell phones, and VoIP phones.

The pricing is 3c/minute for regular inbound/outbound calls and 5c/minute for toll free. This service is only for US, as of now. I am still testing the product so a future post will cover that.

The idea is definitely very good and as the price comes down it will be useful for many applications. Infact I have already observed other upcoming products such as mobile PBX for the cloud and will write about them soon. Just as cloud infrastructure allowed startups to save on time and cost, telephony in the cloud will make integrating telephony services to web apps a snap.