[Asterisk-biz] VOIP in India

[Scott Lykens]

On Thu, 16 Dec 2004 08:32:35 -0500, John gerlich <jgerlich at verizon.net> wrote:

> VoIP in India is illegal. The rules are strict and prohibit phone to phone
> use of VoIP both in country and internationally. The co-location that we had
> located our VXML servers in India had it's telephone connectivity terminated
> by the Telco because of a co-located customer doing VoIP. We did manage to
> get the Telco to reactivate our service for a period of 2 weeks while we
> found another facility.

It is not VoIP itself that is illegal; I had been running a TDM
private network to India since 1993 and upgraded it to VoIP in 2000.
Local telecom/government is only interested in you not bypassing them
and we were often checked to make sure we were not interconnecting our
private network to the local PSTN, even with only one phone line.

Like any government run monopoly, they simply want their share.

Liberalization is coming but I don't know how long it will be until it
reaches the kind of playing field we enjoy in the US or even Western
Europe.