India to ban illegal VoIP

Source: voipcentral.org

The government of India has decided to ban illegal VoIP services operating in the country. The BPOs and other call centers using VoIP services of unlicensed service providers will face clampdown.

The Department of Telecommunication (DoT) will very soon come up with stringent rules and regulations to block the illegal internet telephony services that kill government revenue.

An Economictimes report explains the telecom department is introducing a provision that compels the ITes companies to furnish the names of authorized service providers from whom bandwidth and internet minutes have taken.

The companies must also submit an undertaking that they will not use the services of unlicensed service providers including Skype, Vonage, Yahoo!, Net2Phone, Dialpad, Impetus, Novanet and Euros.

According to DoT, the above-unlicensed service providers offer 30 million minutes of IP telephony services every month to corporate sectors, call centers and BPOs in India. They do not pay 12 percent service tax and six percent of revenue share. For which, the government is losing revenue share on internet telephony.

If the rules were implemented, then the global giants like Skype, Yahoo!, Vonage, Net2Phone, Dialpad , Impetus, Novanet and Euros would no longer run their operation in Indian territory.