Govt crackdown on Illegal VoIP calls.

Even though net telephony is legal in India from Jan-2006, their is still lot of il-legal termination of these calls on PSTN circuits /landphones without proper agreement and royalties. In a letter to the DoT, the Internet Service Providers Association of India (ISPAI) said:

Internet telephony services can be offered in India either by an ISP specifically permitted to do so or by a unified access service licensee. However, several service providers such as Skype, Net2Phone, Yahoo, and MSN, are providing Internet telephony services to people in India. Most of these foreign service providers do offer termination in Indian fixed-line telephones as well.

Also, such service offering is resulting in loss of revenue to the Government by way of licence fee as well as by way of service tax.

As usual, our Government is too slow to act and its policies way too old for the fast changing world of technology. Ultimate loser is the consumer.