As a follow-up to my post yesterday about how Indian telcos are complaining to the the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) about WhatsApp’s plans to launch VoIP, long-time VoIP blogger Aswath Rao took issue on Twitter with one particular sentence in my article:
India has NOT been a very friendly place for VoIP historically, and so we’ll have to see what happens here…
In a series of tweets Aswath pointed out that the TRAI has in fact been very supportive of IP-to-IP VoIP services and has left them unregulated. The regulation has all been around VoIP services interconnecting to the Indian PSTN. Aswath’s tweets:
@danyork You are mistaken when you say "India has NOT been a very friendly place for VoIP historically". And I have pted it out many times.
— Aswath Rao (@aswath) December 27, 2014
You are mistaken when you say “India has NOT been a very friendly place for VoIP historically”. And I have pted it out many times.
@danyork From the get go, TRAI has regulated only IP to Indian PSTN. IP/IP & IP to foreign PSTN have been unregulated
— Aswath Rao (@aswath) December 27, 2014
From the get go, TRAI has regulated only IP to Indian PSTN. IP/IP & IP to foreign PSTN have been unregulated
@akalsey @danyork My oint is that TRAI has been very enlightened in its ruling. Even after 11/26 attack & pressure it has not reg IP/IP
— Aswath Rao (@aswath) December 27, 2014
My point is that TRAI has been very enlightened in its ruling. Even after 11/26 attack & pressure it has not reg IP/IP
Given that Aswath has been very involved in VoIP in India for many years, I’ll defer to his opinion on this one.
Thanks, Aswath, for challenging me on this sentence.
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Thanks for taking the effort to post this explanation. If I am a bit impertinent, it is because I am still smarting from one VoIP CEO (I forget his name or his company now) gave a testimony in US Congress. At that time he mentioned that India has made VoIP illegal. Subsequently I commented at different blogs about TRAI’s ruling. But the other narrative suited the mood at that time and it got traction. So much so, many Indians residing there repeated it. Please take a look at Para 3.1 in http://www.trai.gov.in/WriteReaddata/ConsultationPaper/Document/cpaper12may08.pdf. This refers to earlier ruling.
One thing TRAI can be accused of is their greediness in insisting that IP traffic must go through International gateway. It is understandable because at that time it was a major source of revenue. Not just revenue, but in convertible currency (think of taxation without representation).
I will be the first one to say that there are lots of bad decisions made by the GoI. But this particular agency, in the case of Internet in general and VoIP in particular they have been very reasoned and have withstood even pressure from national security agency. You may have read periodically that GoI insisting that BBM must be routed through a gateway in India. As far as we know publicly, nothing have come to pass.
Thanks for taking the effort to post this explanation. If I am a bit impertinent, it is because I am still smarting from one VoIP CEO (I forget his name or his company now) gave a testimony in US Congress. At that time he mentioned that India has made VoIP illegal. Subsequently I commented at different blogs about TRAI’s ruling. But the other narrative suited the mood at that time and it got traction. So much so, many Indians residing there repeated it. Please take a look at Para 3.1 in http://www.trai.gov.in/WriteReaddata/ConsultationPaper/Document/cpaper12may08.pdf. This refers to earlier ruling.
One thing TRAI can be accused of is their greediness in insisting that IP traffic must go through International gateway. It is understandable because at that time it was a major source of revenue. Not just revenue, but in convertible currency (think of taxation without representation).
I will be the first one to say that there are lots of bad decisions made by the GoI. But this particular agency, in the case of Internet in general and VoIP in particular they have been very reasoned and have withstood even pressure from national security agency. You may have read periodically that GoI insisting that BBM must be routed through a gateway in India. As far as we know publicly, nothing have come to pass.