VOIP to become legal in India

Finally India is catching up on VOIP and things might change in the next coming months with VOIP being completely legal. Especially connectivity between PC to PSTN phone and mobile phones can be completely legal very soon.

Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) will soon allow connectivity between PC and fixed and mobile phones. That means telephone/VOIP calls could be made from a personal computer to a fixed phone or a mobile phone. This is currently illegal, Those who do it use PSTN networks via VOIP gateway and SIP. allowing mainstream VOIP providers to come forward and build a VOIP network across India.

According to estimated, the current international calls terminating in India are about are about 300 million minutes in a quarter. With VOIP being legal, almost 50% of these calls will be routed via VOIP and finally terminating on PSTN/Mobile. However It would be interesting to see how TRAI enables this. Will they restrict this to certain licesed VOIP operators or allow new VOIP providers to build a network.

This will not only impact the International calls market but also impact the national long distance calls making them cheaper. With VOIP being legal in India, We could see International calls rates to India could fall as low as 2-3 cents per minute. Some big providers can even offer calls to india at 1 cent.

Don't be too surprised if you see India being included in FREE VOIP or free international calls offers in near future.