Anirban Biswas
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Call from India to US for Rs1.20/min
«on:
02/21/02 at 15:23:56 » |
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Good news for our friends & relatives in India
-Anirban
Telegraph, Cal news---
FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
New Delhi, Feb. 20:
The savage beep-and-bop world of communications is buzzing with excitement over the mother of all battles that will begin on April 1 when you will be able to call a friend in the US for the price of a local call. That’s right — pay just Rs 1.20 a minute for a call to the US against the current rate of Rs 42 a minute.
Welcome to the brave new world of Internet telephony — which is dirt cheap, though call clarity may not equal the normal call networks. However, consumers are unlikely to complain and, in any case, software and hardware are being developed to deal with the problem.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) today announced that it would allow the market to determine cyber telephony call charges — and that spells big competition for Tata-acquired VSNL, whose monopoly on handling international call traffic expires on the same day.
The players who are likely to offer Net telephony include all basic fixed line service providers, national long distance operators (STD operators), international long distance operators (ILD operators) and even Internet service providers (ISPs).
This could also wreck the plans of private players like Reliance, the Bharti Group, Data Access and Pacific Netinvest, all of whom received letters of intent today to establish international long distance services by setting up their own expensive communication gateways.
Trai’s virtually hands-off policy on cyber telephony has upset the telecom operators. Their grouse is over the ISPs’ unfettered entry into the Net telephony business.
“Unlike us, they did not have to pay a licence fee or enter into a revenue sharing arrangement with the government,” sources in Bharti said.
“They have no roll-out obligations like cellular and basic operators, which means they will incur no social costs and will be free to enter one of the most lucrative segments of the market,” said a telecom industry analyst.
Amitabh Singhal, secretary general of the Internet Service Providers Association of India (ISPAI), says: “The recommendations will in fact boost the revenues of the telecom operators since most Net users will be connected to the Net over fixed-line phones.”
International telephony market is big business: monopolist VSNL had reported call traffic revenues in 2000-01 of over Rs 6,000 crore with 2.6 billion minutes of call traffic.
Internet telephony can be provided in three ways depending on the access devices, which could be a personal computer or a phone.
To provide greater flexibility to operators and more options to customers, Trai has also recommended that in addition to toll-quality telephony service, operators can also offer a lower-than-toll quality telephony service to customers who are ready to accept some degradation in voice quality.
This can be done by providing a separate voice over Internet protocol (VOIP) based backbone which can be accessed by a different service code. |
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