If you were thinking to greet your friends, relatives or colleagues for free using Skype, Viber or LINE, then just hold on. This news is going to shock you for sure. India’s largest telecom operator in terms of user-base, Airtel has announced an extra charge for making VoIP calls even if you are on one of their data packs. This means you’ll now have to pay some extra money to use all those free voice and video calling services such as Skype, Viber, LINE and more.
Indian telecom and internet service providers have suffered quite a loss with the introduction of services such as WhatsApp, Viber and Skype. These services directly hit on the main source of revenue for the telecom operators, that is SMS and Calls. These services are allowing users to send free text messages around the world for free. In addition, Viber and Skype also allow to make calls over the Internet for free or at very cheap rates.
Earlier, the telecom operators increased prices of their regular data packs in order to neutralize these losses they’ve been incurring. But, now, Bharti Airtel has come forward to charge extra for the VoIP calls. In the terms and conditions section of their 3G plans, now Airtel clearly mentions that,
All Special Tariff Vouchers (STVs) for data services (through which customer can avail discounted rate) shall only be valid for internet browsing and will exclude VoIP. To avail VoIP services, customer would need to purchase a separate STV for VoIP.
Airtel has also announced a VoIP plan on its website for ₹75 that allows you 100MB of VoIP data, valid for 28 days. It is estimated that this will allow customers to make around 250 minutes of calls. This means you will have to pay around ₹1000 for 1GB of VoIP data.
VoIP over data connectivity would be charged at standard data rates of 4p/10 KB (3G service) and 10p/10 KB (2G service)
This is clearly a violation of the Net Neutrality principle, whereby service providers need to treat all the data usage on Internet equally and not to impose any extra charges for any sort of services, apps, content or users.
An Open Internet is our right, and we must all stand against Airtel for this greedy move of theirs.
iShivam 