On 22nd June 2016, TRAI has released a consultation paper on Internet Telephony. The objective of the consultation paper is to promote internet telephony (VoIP) in the country. In March 2006, the UASL operators were permitted to do VoIP. Compared to PSTN, VoIP is efficient and better in cost structure but still has not taken off in India. Why? What are the technological, regulatory and business challenges? This note is an attempt to investigate these issues.
The Technology : Conventional vs Internet Telephony
The conventional voice calls are circuit switched. They are set up as nailed up dedicated connections between the communicating users. Unlike VoIP, these calls (conventional voice) are managed and prioritized by the network when they share the same pipe used for carrying internet traffic. VoIP calls, on the other hand, are carried on the principle of “best effort” and therefore have to compete with normal internet traffic. Hence, the user of a VoIP call might experience intermittently breaks (loss of speech) in case the internet traffic is very high or the pipe carrying it is too thin. With the improvement in coding and internet speeds, the quality of VoIP call will significantly improve if not at par with network managed voice calls.
