In June 2018, DoT announced with some fanfare that VoIP calls would now be “untethered”. Is this time for a celebration?
The truth is, VoIP calling became mainstream a long time ago. The original restrictions were designed to make life difficult in a world where phones were dumb and PCs smart; the world moved on and the restriction that both sides needed the same app installed became a fairly insignificant one. To add ketchup to the fries, smartphones smartly built deep integration to the point where the VoIP applications themselves did not need to be fiddled about with. Calls could be initiated from phonebooks directly and missed or received calls showed up along with “regular” phonecalls. And Indians caught on quickly — indeed, even while the ban was operational in full in 2017, (according to data from Warp Speed Reads, a telecom and technology research firm) some 28% of all voice calls in India were VoIP calls made through WhatsApp and Skype and the like. That’s over 80 billion call minutes; one might say more than a few horses have bolted.
Why have such a regulation at all, especially since we seem to be quite at odds here with the rest of the world? The original reason was protection of telco revenues — especially those eye-watering rates that telcos charged you for long distance and international calling (in the year 2000, calling 1,000km away would cost over Rs 30/min) supposedly to compensate for their investments in networks. Then came 2003 and Skype, which threatened to derail the party by charging next to nothing whatever the distance. Now the powers-that-be could have rewarded services that seemingly was good for consumers while punishing overcharging incumbents but such was not to be. VoIP was duly banned, at least where ever it touched anything that the Telcos thought as their domain. Computer-to-computer calling purely over data networks was exempt; but try to link any bit of a voice call to the telecom network (“VoIP-to-PSTN bridging” in the lingo) and someone would pounce menacingly. Telcos themselves moved conveniently to VoIP backbones to carry traffic across states and countries, but any whiff of innovation from anyone outside the charmed circle was quickly snuffed out.
To bolster their case the telcos had the support of the security establishment who proclaimed loudly the problems of caller ID and intercepting of VoIP calls of drug dealers and terrorists while they were chatting about the weather and whatnot. No one told the terrorists of course; the 26/11 perpetrators seem not to have bothered about the ban. It created a nice absurdity; the only kind of VoIP that was banned was the kind that started or ended in a regular phone line — easily tapped with conventional means on the telco side. The app-to-app variety that was indeed difficult to intercept —ah, well not only was it allowed (maybe a bit grey, that area there) it was widely, widely, widely used.
You may ask, why bother anyway. So somethings were banned, some were not, a bit of absurdity helped spice up things but no harm was done. Mothers got to talk to their NRI sons without much fuss, Nanu, Ringo and a few upstarts griped a bit but all was overall fine. The truth is, this policy did indeed cost the Indian industry a goodly bit — modern call centres process voice calls through lots of software to stay competitive, and in India that meant a complex, expensive dance of multiple telecom lines and PRI cards, all tied together with unnecessary, frustratingly difficult customized integrations. Every BPO, every tech multinational, every company that had anything substantial by way of a call centre had to run mini telecom empires to stay competitive while their global counterparts failed to understand what the fuss was about. And we kicked out or harassed a generation of entrepreneurs — people like Bhavin Turakhia or Ambarish Gupta moved focus to other countries and left India alone. Even a giant like Reliance Infocomm ran into walls in trying to make international calls cheaper using a VoIP backhaul.
What changed? In a word — Jio. The license that the bigger Reliance acquired on the way to telecom supremacy was only for data, so becoming a voice operator required some gymnastics and a change in the rulings. Luckily, big brother had the required charm and things happened; not as fast or as fully as people would have liked but better than before. The clarification, even as it has come, leaves enough unsaid ambiguity to make Samuel Beckett smile. If things do go the way of the rest of the world, though, we can expect a few price drops, service offerings and entrepreneurial wealth creators to follow.
So to that extent, yes — it is time to celebrate. Just don’t expect the fireworks to be very loud.
The truth is, VoIP calling became mainstream a long time ago. The original restrictions were designed to make life difficult in a world where phones were dumb and PCs smart; the world moved on and the restriction that both sides needed the same app installed became a fairly insignificant one. To add ketchup to the fries, smartphones smartly built deep integration to the point where the VoIP applications themselves did not need to be fiddled about with. Calls could be initiated from phonebooks directly and missed or received calls showed up along with “regular” phonecalls. And Indians caught on quickly — indeed, even while the ban was operational in full in 2017, (according to data from Warp Speed Reads, a telecom and technology research firm) some 28% of all voice calls in India were VoIP calls made through WhatsApp and Skype and the like. That’s over 80 billion call minutes; one might say more than a few horses have bolted.
Why have such a regulation at all, especially since we seem to be quite at odds here with the rest of the world? The original reason was protection of telco revenues — especially those eye-watering rates that telcos charged you for long distance and international calling (in the year 2000, calling 1,000km away would cost over Rs 30/min) supposedly to compensate for their investments in networks. Then came 2003 and Skype, which threatened to derail the party by charging next to nothing whatever the distance. Now the powers-that-be could have rewarded services that seemingly was good for consumers while punishing overcharging incumbents but such was not to be. VoIP was duly banned, at least where ever it touched anything that the Telcos thought as their domain. Computer-to-computer calling purely over data networks was exempt; but try to link any bit of a voice call to the telecom network (“VoIP-to-PSTN bridging” in the lingo) and someone would pounce menacingly. Telcos themselves moved conveniently to VoIP backbones to carry traffic across states and countries, but any whiff of innovation from anyone outside the charmed circle was quickly snuffed out.
To bolster their case the telcos had the support of the security establishment who proclaimed loudly the problems of caller ID and intercepting of VoIP calls of drug dealers and terrorists while they were chatting about the weather and whatnot. No one told the terrorists of course; the 26/11 perpetrators seem not to have bothered about the ban. It created a nice absurdity; the only kind of VoIP that was banned was the kind that started or ended in a regular phone line — easily tapped with conventional means on the telco side. The app-to-app variety that was indeed difficult to intercept —ah, well not only was it allowed (maybe a bit grey, that area there) it was widely, widely, widely used.
You may ask, why bother anyway. So somethings were banned, some were not, a bit of absurdity helped spice up things but no harm was done. Mothers got to talk to their NRI sons without much fuss, Nanu, Ringo and a few upstarts griped a bit but all was overall fine. The truth is, this policy did indeed cost the Indian industry a goodly bit — modern call centres process voice calls through lots of software to stay competitive, and in India that meant a complex, expensive dance of multiple telecom lines and PRI cards, all tied together with unnecessary, frustratingly difficult customized integrations. Every BPO, every tech multinational, every company that had anything substantial by way of a call centre had to run mini telecom empires to stay competitive while their global counterparts failed to understand what the fuss was about. And we kicked out or harassed a generation of entrepreneurs — people like Bhavin Turakhia or Ambarish Gupta moved focus to other countries and left India alone. Even a giant like Reliance Infocomm ran into walls in trying to make international calls cheaper using a VoIP backhaul.
What changed? In a word — Jio. The license that the bigger Reliance acquired on the way to telecom supremacy was only for data, so becoming a voice operator required some gymnastics and a change in the rulings. Luckily, big brother had the required charm and things happened; not as fast or as fully as people would have liked but better than before. The clarification, even as it has come, leaves enough unsaid ambiguity to make Samuel Beckett smile. If things do go the way of the rest of the world, though, we can expect a few price drops, service offerings and entrepreneurial wealth creators to follow.
So to that extent, yes — it is time to celebrate. Just don’t expect the fireworks to be very loud.
Comments
Post a Comment