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Lowdown on VoIP regulations at the IAMAI-Microsoft roundtable

On Tuesday, Microsoft and Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) organized a roundtable to discuss regulations around VoIP services in India. The event was attended by officials from Department of Telecom, Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), Microsoft and Vodafone among others, while officials from Bharti Airtel and Idea did not turn up. Here's a lowdown of what went on at the roundtable: History of ISPs and internet regulation in India Deepak Maheshwari, Symantec's director of government affairs in India and ASEAN, said that back in January 1998, internet service providers (ISPs) were allowed to provide a small bouquet of services including www and email. Any other service needed permission from the government. In November 1998, ISPs were allowed to offer anything they wanted except internet telephony, before allowing it in April 2002. At the same time, telecom operators contended that some of their regulatory burden and license fees should be reduced since the government allowed internet services and VoIP was a possibility. Initially, incoming traffic was four times the outgoing traffic. TRAI did not allow people to make calls from an IP network to circuit switched networks within India but allowed for international calls, which Maheshwari describes as a "balancing act." In 2006, Unified Access (UASL) and Cellular Mobile Telephone Service (CMTS) license holders were permitted unrestricted internet services and allowed to people make calls from VoIP services to landlines or mobiles, a significant advantage over companies such as WhatsApp and Skype. And yet none of them has rolled it out. "India continues to be the only…

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