Better late than never! The much need Voice over Internet (VOIP) services have been approved by the Indian Telecom Commission and will be released in National Telecom Policy 2012 as per Mint, who have reviewed an internal DoT memo in regards to this.
Currently, in India, Voice over internet is only allowed in a restricted manner, where a user can either make calls from his computer outside India or receive calls on his/her Computer. Internet calls cannot be terminated on a landline or a mobile phone with some exceptions.
how VOIP Works
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Globally, VOIP is a norm and Telecom Operators have benefitted from it a lot. Launch of VOIP in India has been a talking point for number of years now, and finally it will be implemented as per the new National Telecom Policy.
Once the VOIP services are implemented, mobile or landlines users can make calls from normal telephones over the internet to another telephone in India or abroad. With VOIP, the voice call rates, especially international, are expected to drop further. Given that local mobile or landline calls are already quite cheap in India, those rates may not see much of a change.
In the previous BWA Spectrum auction, Infotel, now a Reliance company was the only one who bagged the Pan-India license and they will benefit the most with this move. Reliance can now easily use Internet as their backbone for carrying the voice call traffic through-out India as well as abroad.
This move will also help lot of internet companies who offer voice & data services (although, they will need to tie-up with licensed telecom operators to offer those services)
Overall, VOIP approval will help Indian users as well as Telecom Operators tremendously in bringing down the cost!