After gobbling up nearly US$40 million in fines from two Bangladeshi operators for using VoIP, it is now the turn of India’s largest cell operator Bharti Airtel to shell out US$13 million in fines for disregarding VoIP related rules in India.
I have in fact lost my track of how VoIP is regulated in India. In April 2002, when the international long distance (ILD) market was deregulated, the use of VoIP was allowed in various amusing flavors. Enterprises could use VoIP in closed user networks ‘between H.323 and SIP end points as long as they did not interconnect with the PSTN’. Carriers were allowed to interconnect with the PSTN as long as it was not a retail VoIP service. So you had carriers like Data Access and VSNL deploy VoIP gateways.
All ISPs automatically got Internet telephony licenses and could offer PC-to-Phone service. However, the phone to which the call was terminated into would have to be overseas and not in India. As an end user of PC-to-Phone service you had to subscribe to an Indian service provider and not to someone like Net2phone and Skype.
Then some two years back it got even more amusing. Now the ISPs offering the PC-to-Phone service had to share Internet telephony revenue with the government. Retail voice-over-broadband (phone-to-phone) was legalized for the first time, but interconnection to PSTN was not allowed. I am not sure how to allow a VoBB service and not the PSTN interconnection. Not sure how Aksh is doing it for MTNL then!
Airtel has been fined because they connected a VoIP gateway to the PSTN. If this is against the rules, then I wonder how Data Access was allowed to do this and why indeed VSNL is still doing so. Or if both these operators were allowed to do this, then are they using TDM gateways to convert traffic back to TDM and then interconnect to PSTN? If the regulators are so allergic to VoIP, what about the IP-to-PSTN conversion card inside the VoIP gateways? Would that suffice for the purposes of regulatory compliance?
What all this means is that you need one hell of a lawyer to do VoIP business in India! And then you can mint it with $0.025 per minute for international calls. However be ready for a $20 million fine. Assuming you make a margin of $0.005 per minute, you need to have carried 4 billion minutes of international call minutes in order to pay the fine only.