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)
