BSNL’s VoIP will kill the grey minutes
VoIP regulation in India requires the provider to be a licensed ISP in the country. So strictly speaking, SkypeOut type PC-to-Phone calls are actually illegal in India. Since technology started bypassing the regulation 1995 onwards, the ‘grey’ international call minutes have beefed up quite a bit in India. Those minutes could now be killed by the upcoming country-wide VoIP offering from BSNL. A lot of outgoing international grey traffic will come under the legal fold I suppose, just because of the scale of BSNL’s intended country wide offering. Grey minutes account for nearly 30% of India’s outgoing international voice traffic. A lot of BPO companies have recently been fined for VoIP usage.
BSNL will not confine VoIP to just the residential users. IP Centrex services are also going to be made available. STD Booths – few million small communications shops in the country that typically come with phone/fax/photocopying/bill-payment type services - will also be equipped with BSNL’s VoIP. The provider expects to sign up around 2.5 million VoIP customers which sounds a bit ambitious. Its target for broadband subscriber base was 3 million as of end December 2007. There is also a little hitch in the story. Domestic long distance calls will not be included fully in the offering. Domestic calls will be strictly PC-to-PC only or VoIP-user to VoIP-user.
BSNL is expecting 80% of the calls made by its future VoIP subscribers to be international.
The incumbent operator serving the entire country except the cities of New Delhi and Mumbai will not be deploying its own VoIP infrastructure for the service. The incumbent will contract out the service to 8 ‘franchisees’ throughout the country. Yes, franchisees. That is something BSNL is doing different.
Usually you find telcos going in for a private label service from someone they term as a wholesaler. Examples include SBC and Verizon contracting with Deltathree in the past or Bellsouth using Packet8 VoBB services. BSNL will use services of multiple ‘wholesalers’ or 'ASPs' in various parts of the country. And it calls them ‘Franchisees’ instead. Sounds something different. It certainly falls in place with BSNL’s overall franchisee strategy across a plethora of services and products it offers.
Revenue sharing arrangements with the franchisees will not be uniform. BSNL will most probably go with the best price in each region. There are going to be both prepaid and postpaid billing options. Postpaid billing will be integrated into BSNL’s existing PSTN bills.
Service providers in India have never been particularly impressed by VoIP. When the international calls market was opened up for competition in India back in April 2002, most new entrants went for TDM equipment and not VoIP. VoIP technology was not mature enough at the time. When domestic long distance markets were liberalised, VoIP got yet another flick. BSNL has tried its hand at web based telephony before. But the service failed. Better luck this time.
QoS should not be a problem since BSNL now offers decent speeds of up to 8Mbps to the end user. The ATA cost (around $40) also should not be a major issue. I think one of the main things this service will achieve is to reduce the international call charges further. The fact that domestic long distance calls are not allowed to touch the PSTN is a major hiccup.
