Finally some good news for people who would like to use IP telephony to make long distance international calls legally 🙂 from India. You can check out the press release from TRAI here. It was just one year back that MTNL has started offering the VoIP services to its subscribers in Delhi and Mumbai. The subscribers then had to get a Analog Telephone Adaptor which would be connected to ADSL modem. Call rates to US, UK, Canada, etc were just Re. 1 per minute and there were various subscription offers like lifetime plan or pre-paid services, etc. Now, TRAI has removed any sort of regulations on using IP telephony (calls can be terminated on PSTN and not just a pc) by any subscriber. This move is definitely going to slash the ISD rates in India. And to me this SPA3102 from Linksys looks to be one good option to go for as suggested by one of my colleagues. The press release mentioned above has got more details.
Another good news for subscribers:
Very soon we will get to choose the cheapest STD and IST tariffs irrespective of the service provider. The subscribers will be having freedom to choose carrier of their own for making long distance calls. TRAI initially had a plan to implement carrier access code (CAC) but due to resistance from telcos, it wasn’t implemented. With this new directive, the subscribers will have to buy pre-paid long distance package from any of the operators and then just dial-in a set of numbers to get on to that service provider’s network. More details on this can be read from this economic times article.
With all these new initiatives it looks like in the coming few months, long distance calls from India are going to reduce drastically.