MTNL offers 1 Rs VOIP Calls

With more and more VOIP companies offering cheap rates, the pressure was building on Indian Telecommunication Industry to match up to the people's expectations.

MTNL, India's leading telecom provider has now cut rates to Rs.1 for its Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) customers to about 100 countries such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Japan, Malaysia and Kuwait.

MTNL already provider VOIP calls at Rs. 1 to the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong. This makes MTNL the cheapest way to call almost anywhere in the world. The mobile companies offer around Rs.3-6 to most international destinations.

Rs. 1 is almost 2.5 USD cents per minute which by far the cheapest rate to call international destinations. MTNL will surely give foreign VOIP providers a run for it's money. However with increasing competition, the consumers will see more rate cuts in future. I guess we don't have to wait for too long to see 1 cent per minute calls which is about 50 paise per minute to most destinations.

This will not only make India one of the cheapest countries to call from but will put India on a global VOIP roadmap. The biggest hurdle is however the costly termination charges which needs to be iradicated by TRAI. Its time to make india about 2-3 cents per minute with low termination charges. This will not only iradicate grey market VOIP operators but in turn help local telecom providers to make significant money for increasing volume based business.

MTNL however has strange policies as part of their program and we criticised their TOS which says, SIP to SIP calls are not Free. Which is actually a joke.

Indian VOIP affected due to Internet outage

I just got some confirmed news from internal sources and also from News sources, that India is currently badly affected by a nation-wide Internet Outage this also includes an outage to VOIP service in India since VOIP traffic is routed via Internet.

Extensive damage to two undersea cables has thrown Internet activity across large parts of India, Asia and the Middle East, out of gear. According to reports, a ship anchoring off Egypt's Alexandria coast cut through the Indian-owned FLAG and also the SEA-ME-WE cable on Wednesday, leading to an unprecedented disruption in international connectivity.

How soon will they fix it?

"The repair will take another 15-20 days," Internet Service Providers Association of India president Rajesh Chharia said.

Sounds like people in India will suffer for next 2 weeks. Along with Internet, VOIP will suffer as it's by product.

This raises some questions how effective is VOIP when it comes to Internet Outage? Well, VOIP is still perceived as secondary choice of communication in less developed countries. Honestly, only US consumers take VOIP more seriously than anywhere else in the world. The picture is however changing.

If you are affected by today's internet outage and still able to post here, please let us know your story :-)