The Lose Lose Proposition

With broadband connections on a steady rise, making calls on the
Net has seen many takers. Home users keep in touch with their families and
friends with simple and free software and a headset.  But what's legal
and not legal remains shrouded in mystery, to most users.

In India, 128 ISPs have been given the license to offer
telephony services. But TRAI says that only 32 of them are currently providing
the services. If you want to make Internet telephone calls, you can use your PC
to call another PC anywhere in the world. You can also use your PC to call a
phone outside India, through your ISP, at a lower price when compared to using
the telephone to make the call. In India, however, you cannot make a call to a
phone unless it is in a closed user group. IP phones that run on the H.323 or
SIP (Session Initiated Protocol) standards and which are connected directly to
an ISP node, can also be used to make calls to similar equipment within or
outside India. However, it is illegal to use equipment which is based on any
other standards or technology to make calls. There are new devices out in the
market which are based on newer IP standards such as MGCP (Media Gateway Control
Protocol), IAX (Inter-Asterix eXchange). But the guidelines from the DoT do not
cover them yet.

What all this means is confusion. And random limits on
what providers can do and what they cannot. Not surprisingly, a huge grey market
has come into existence which rides on an ISP's bandwidth, but bypasses the
ILD operators and does not pay the termination charges. In addition, broadband
users connect to international service provides like Skype, Vonage, etc and make
calls to phones across the world at low rates. Most users do not know that there
could be something not legal about this. Those who maybe aware cannot figure out
why there should be a license for such services.

The users are not limited to homes. A newspaper report
highlighted DoT's proposal to curb calls being made by BPOs using Skype and
other unlicensed services. DoT has estimated  that these services provide
upto 30 mn minutes of calls every month to various companies, especially BPOs.
That is not an earthshaking sum at Rs 1 per minute but do not forget that this
is just an estimate.

Another concern is that of monitoring the calls being
made. National security agencies are authorized to monitor Net telephony
services. Intercepting calls can be a headache. While it is possible to
intercept IP calls being made to a landline network, it is difficult to do the
same with IP to IP calls. Services like Skype also provide 256-bit encryption,
which makes monitoring the calls very tough.

DoT, TRAI, ISPAI have all been highlighting these areas.
Topping the list is educating the users about the illegal services they may be
using unwittingly. But users are driven by cheaper and better options. Blocking
unlicensed services in India is a suggestion, but can it be effective? TRAI, in
its consultation paper, says that the rise of the grey market is because of
the easy availability of easy-to-use devices for Net telephony. But can that be
stopped?

The answer obviously lies in removing the artificial
restrictions and having a policy framework that this form of telephony is here
to stay-and will get progressively better. In the present scenario all but one
are losers. The Government and operators lose revenue. The customer loses the
benefits of a new technology. The only one who gains is the gray market
operator.

Surely that is not the objective of any policy.