Rony,
Quoting Rony ronbillypop@yahoo.co.uk:
On Sun, Jul 09, 2006 at 03:35:17PM +0530, Saswata Banerjee & Associates wrote:
VOIP market is already open and available to you to use. The reason why it has not proceeded well is that VOIP rates are so low that they cant afford to pay interconnect charges for connecting to local telcos. Each call minute that terminates in a local landline or cell phone in India, the operator gets 30 paisa. If the VOIP operator is willing to pay that money to the telco, they will sign an interconnect agreement (there is also a annual socket fee of some amount). But at the VOIP rates, it is not viable.
Hi Saswata,
Since you are into VoIP, what is the amount of KBs used per minute in a voip conversation? Considering that MTNL and BSNL have rolled out broadband practically all over India, suppose we have a situation where a company is selling cheap internet phones that connect directly to the adsl modem, if all the broadband users install this phone in their premises, from anywhere in India they will be able to call each other as if they are calling an MTNL or BSNL number and if other fixed line providers like TATA, Airtel and Reliance too give broadband on their lines, we will have a situation where all telephones are ip based. In such a scenerio, there will be no need to make outgoing calls on the landlines and for those whose bills run into a few thousand rupees even for local calls, this would be a big boon. We simply pay rent and no outgoing calls.
Ideally a normal phone call that you make is going on uncompressed channel 64kbps (DS0). VoIP is only allowed for major Providers. This is one more reason why you see 1 One India Plan coming from large telcos, they actually are terminating calls internally between their switches via their internal network, so eventually, the route which it takes is: Your phone --> Telco Switch --> Internet or PVT Network --> Remote city own Telco Switch --> Local network, earlier they all had to go through BSNL for terminating calls at remote cities and pay interconnect charges, hence your STD cost were so high (This law came into existence, when Reliance was charged by BSNL and MTNL for not paying their interconnect charges, coz they were routing all calls through their own laid fibres)
In this situation, will the telcos. allow this to happen? Will they place curbs on voip usage in order to save their revenue? Does the law have any such provision?
Skype :), Yahoo Messenger, MSN messenger and people are making calls, but law forbids anyone to interconnect with PSTN, so ideally its only PC to PC calls which are legal. No one other then basic telephony licensed providers are allowed to interconnect (they have to pay hefty interconnect charges on top of the 250crore bank gaurantee to Govt. of India)
This very same license fee has been reduced from 250 to 5 crore where by opening up field for more telco providers, But again lot of lobbying is happening here, telco / ITSPs are not allowed to interconnect with providers who are not ITSPs/telcos which means, if you have a basic telephony license you cant connect a user of normal ISP, you need to either lay your own fibre to the subscriber with your POP or use a middle man who also neccesary needs to be ITSP (Naturally when you use this middle man, they are not going to lease their fibre for free, so this means there is less competition, either lay your own fibre or pay interconnect charges to use middle man's fibre)
So now you see, all the freedom that you see made by TRAI is only in favour of large telco's who laid their fibre (Reliance, TATA, Bharti) not a fair game to play, telcos /ISPs are really not bothered you using a ATA, coz they are any ways making money on the bandwidth that you utilize to place such a call (64kbps unless otherwise you use any kind of codec, which again are not free, all of them are patented. G729 is the most popular one, it allows you to place calls at 8kbps)
Hope that helps.
Thanks & Regards, Mitul Limbani, Founder & CEO, Enterux Solutions, The Enterprise Linux Company (TM), www.enterux.com