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Lifting of ban on Internet telephony under consideration

Cutting through costs in domestic and international calls will soon become a reality as the government ban on Internet telephony will be lifted shortly.

Government sources said that the Department of Telecommunications has set up a special internal group headed by the deputy director general (regulation) for recommending a strategy. ''The recommendations will be placed before the Telecom Commission soon," an official said.

Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited chairman and managing director Shailendra Gupta said that his company will definitely be affected by the introduction of Net telephony. "But the march of technology cannot be stopped," he said. Gupta said that before this revolutionary step is taken, tariffs of conventional phones must be cut by at least 50 per cent.

The issue of lifting the ban on Internet telephony is being taken up at the highest levels of the government, a telecom official informed. Subscribers to India's only ISP, the government-controlled Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd, were banned earlier this year from using their Internet connection for telephony or faxing. Subscribers who broke the rule were threatened with disconnection from the service and possible prosecution.

VSNL is also India's monopoly national telecommunications provider and is believed to have taken a stance against Internet telephony. The stance comes in response to the potential threat of its customers using the Internet to make cheaper national and international phone calls.

But a number of industry experts, including the chairman of VSNL, say that there is no way VSNL could detect people using the Internet for telephony and prosecutions made against offenders probably wouldn't stand up in court.

VSNL has not employed any device to detect the illegal use of voice transfer over the Internet. As a result, "even if VSNL files a case against those providing such services, there is no way it can prove telephony was being provided," said an ex-Department of Telecommunications official.

While the Department of Telecommunications has been quick to respond to the advent of Internet telephony, India's telecom regulator has yet to address the subject. The problem VSNL has detecting in IP telephony users is because its gateway access for Internet services -- the node that routes Internet traffic -- cannot differentiate between voice and data. ''I doubt whether it's possible for anyone today to regulate the use of technology too much," a VSNL official said.

It has become fashionable among pundits to proclaim that the future of Internet telephony is imperiled by the likely loss of its exemption from the access fees local phone companies charge long distance providers for use of their networks. While forcing Internet telephony to pay these fees would clearly slow its development, commentators including Francis Gaskins, have exaggerated the short-term threat while ignoring the powerful long-term forces that are driving IP's adoption as the standard for telecommunications networks.

While access charges will certainly slow the move to IP telephony, the long-run migration to IP telephony is probably irreversible. IP offers the ability to remove telecom networks as roadblocks to technological change and will unleash a host of new services integrating voice with data.

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