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 ca...
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