Airtel drops plans to charge extra for internet voice calls

THRISSUR,16/09/2012.A man talking his mobile phone against the backdrop of a mobile tower in Thrissur, Kerala. The environment ministry has issued an advisory asking the department of telecommunications not to permit new mobile towers within one- kilometre radius of existing ones to prevent the impact of electromagnetic radiation (EMR) on birds and bees. It also suggested location-wise GIS mapping of all cell phone towers to help in monitoring the population of birds and bees in and around the mobile tower area and wildlife protection area.Photo:K_K_Mustafah.

Bharti Airtel on Monday announced rolling back of plan to start charging customers for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services that include applications such as Skype, Line and Viber, which lets users make free calls through the Internet.

The telecom operator said, “In view of the news reports that a consultation paper will be issued shortly by TRAI on issues relating to services offered by OTT players including VoIP, we have decided not to implement our proposed launch of VoIP packs.”

Airtel had last week decided to charge VoIP calls wherein user could chose VoIP specific data packs. For prepaid users, the VoIP pack was priced at Rs 75 for 75 MB with a validity of 28 days. Similar plan was announced for postpaid customers.

Presently, users are not charged any fee by the operators to use these applications. They just need to pay the regular data charge for Internet browsing.

The move by Airtel received a lot of flak from users on social media and also sparked a discussion over net neutrality. The operator, however, had defended it saying it had invested over Rs 1,40,000 crore in rolling out network and further Rs. 50,000 crore have been paid as government levies and, therefore it found offering VoIP services for free as not tenable for business.

In response to Airtel’s statement on the business not being viable in the current form,

Medianama , a portal on telecom, pointed out that in just the last two and a half years, Airtel has earned Rs. 141,545 crore in revenues, and Rs. 16,211 crore in profit. Over 20 years they have earned substantial return on their investment.

While Airtel's decision to charge more for these services was not in accordance with net neutrality, it is not illegal as there are no norms in the country for the same. Net neutrality is the principle that internet service providers should treat all data on the internet equally, and not discriminate or charge differently by user, content, site, platform, or application.