India on Voip

From past six month there has been a rather steep cut in voip rates to India. Call rates that hovered around 8-15cents/minute are now revolving around 4-10cents per minute thanks to increased voip competition among companies and also to drop in termination charges for international calls by Indian regulator called TRAI. Some of these operators with super Indian call rates are Read the rest of this entry »

Bsnl the sister concern of Mtnl is close to launch Voip Services similar to what Mtnl launched a month back. The tariffs are expected to be same as Mtnl with calling to many international destinations at 1Re/min. This move seems significant in Voip market because private operators have so far refrained from matching MTNL’s move , BSNL’s entry into this segment is set to change the market dynamics and force other operators to follow suit.

All major telcos have not ventured into internet telephony as they fear it will eat into their revenues from traditional mobile and fixedline calls.

Today I will introduce you to some of the famous softphone based Indian Voip Providers. All of these providers requires to download a softphone client on pc along with a prepaid card of Rupee value. This card is available from many Pc stores in India also you could buy it online from provider. Most of these cards allow you to call many destinations at just 1Re per minute. Important point to note is that none of these cards allows you to make outgoing calls locally(India). This is due to fact that India is yet to allow its local Voip provider to terminate call domestically and all these providers are India Based ISPs(In India only Isps could offer voip services). Also these cards have an additional service tax of 12.24% above call value so a 1Re per min call cost 1.12Rs effectively.

Some of these voip providers with major market presence along with there web address

1)Hello World From Vsnl in agreement with Dishnet and Net2phone. (http://www.dialhelloworld.in)
2)Part of world Wide Anyuser Group.(http://anyuserindia.com)
3)PhonewallaRed from Net4India.(http://www.phonewala.com)
4)Bolanmol From mtnl Different from voip service Mtnl launched recently. (http://anmol.bol.net.in)
5)Way2Talk From Sify.com. (http://way2talk.sify.com/products.html)

There are many other small providers however there prepaid cards are not readily available in market.

Most of the voip provider that provide unlimited voip calls always have a usage limit on it…read for the smallest font terms and conditions at bottom of the page.So the best way to call unlimited is to invite others to use same voip provider as almost all the voip provider have policy of free onnet calls(on same company voip network).

Now some of these voip providers are paid while others are free while it would be not appropiate to ask others to select same paid voip provider as there are many possible reasons for choosing a particular vsp(current setup, low ping, low rate to a particular destination) on the other hand free vsp won’t be reliable enough(with zero support) and no outage notification.

The only reliable and free way is to use direct ip2ip calling with dynamic dns. For a direct connection between 2 Voip Adapters you need to have a router having Dynamic DNS client on both ends. Dynamic DNS basically stands for dynamic domain name system and having a DDNS client built in will allow you to have a domain name inspite of
dynamic IP addresses which is a necessity for point to point calling on a Voip adapter.

The steps you will take are as follows:

1. Configure your ATA (or Voip Adapter) to accept IP calls. By making allow incoming calls to yes(in Linksys ata).

2. Make your router to allow SIP calls(port forwarding) through your router firewall.

3. Next u need to go to www.dyndns.com and create an account there. While signing up u need to choose the domain name of ur preference viz. abc.dyndns.org etc this will be the domain name that you will put in the domain name field in ur router. Username & password will be same with which you have created the account.

4. Now you need to choose dyndns as the DDNS server in the router. You need to fill in the details and enable the client in the router and then save & reboot.

Now anyone could call you just by making a dial plan that will forward to sip:username@abc.dyndns.org where username is your existing voip provider username that is currently feeded in ata. Everyone calling you via this way will be directly calling you without any voip provider involved.

Many of you might have read in news if ever interested in India Telecom Market that Mtnl has launched voip service in Delhi. Voip service was available before also however was moslty on dialer based platform while this one is sip based that is you do not need a pc for usage. Thus overcoming the major roadblock for usage of voip as pc penetration is quite low in India.

This could be a giant step in free voice calls as in India free local landline calls regime is still non prevalent. Mtnl said it will provide voip ata or adapters on rental basis and also on one time fees of as low as 1000Rs. While it need to seen that these ata are locked or configurable to any other provider still the cost of device is quite reasonable.

This sip based voip call was already being provided by WorldCom, AnyUserIndia and Net4India however all of them are small Isps with subcriber base not worth to mention. Mtnl on other hand has is leader in fixed line and broadband market of Delhi and Mumbai with subsriber base of more than 4 million FixedLinePhone and 5lakh Broadband customers. It clearly has niche in voip market and soon it would be joined by its sister concern Bsnl(service the rest of India except Delhi and Mumbai). Both of them with substantial marketing budget would make Indians aware of voip services which they think is limited to Yahoo/Msn/Skype only.

There are two plans launched currently Plan A (VoIP400) and Plan B (VoIP200) with 800 minutes SIP-SIP Calls free and 400 minutes SIP-SIP Calls free respectively. These plans are limited on number of sip-sip calls which are mostly offered free in global voip market. Also you are limited to voip2voip and international calls only as the current Indian regulation does not allow voip calls to be terminated domestically it need to come via international long distance provider with all the termination charges to be paid thus eroding the voip cost advantage moreover dids or incoming numbers can’t be availed on a voip line. This may be a major drawback for voip penetration however we hope that in future when voip demand picks up this regulation might be relaxed.