Its official VOIP in India is now Legal

Alas, the day has come. VOIP in India is finally legal. Thanks to continuous efforts by TRAI to push VOIP to mainstream India through ISP and Telecom Operators. Finally, India is now official a VOIP enabled country or should we say soon to be?

we are extremely excited at VOIP Guide to hear this news. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) is recommending unrestricted internet telephony for the country's Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Around Two years ago, India allowed VOIP licenses to offer unrestricted internet telephony, but none of the mobile operators have done so far, since they are afraid VoIP would cut their profits and impact overall revenues. However with this new annoucement to open VOIP to ISP, it will be a different ballgame. The Mobile operators will be forced to join the arena since those who are left out would probably loose out forever. Since ISP's have strong hold in the market now, they can push VOIP services as part of their broadband packages which can make life even more difficult for telecom operators.

We are expecting to see Vodafone and Bharati to launch VOIP services first. There were strong rumous that Bharati is going to launch Advertisement based Free Calls Service in India, I thought this was done in Pilot Phases.

Now since VOIP in India will become legal, what this would mean to you and me?

In simple words, our International calls to India will be lot cheaper. We expect this to be around 50 paise (about 1.2 USD cents). The actual termination cost could be a bit more, but provider like Reliance/Bharati/VSNL can do E1 rates for as low as 25-40 paise (lower than 1 cnets per minute). This would be huge for everyone who wants to make cheap international calls to India. VOIP Providers will enjoy better rates and with increasing competition there will be more impressive deals available in the market. When legal grade 1 carrier routes are available at 1 cents, most likely grey routes would soon be dumped, unless of course people settle for low quality calls for less than 1 cents per minute.

We are just waiting for Govertment to start providing these Licenses to ISP and Telecom operators. We are expecting this to actually take effect by end of this year or first half of 2009. Let us your feelings about this great news.