India may block Internet telephony services

BANGALORE, INDIA: In the wake of a threat to national security, India’s Intelligence Bureau (IB) has reportedly called on the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology to block all Internet telephony services in and out of the country until the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) is able to track such calls, according to an Economic Times report.

According to IB, compared to foreign countries where every call can be tapped, India does not have the mechanism to track domestic and international Internet telephony calls, the report said.

“In the absence of Caller Line Identification (CLI) parameters of calls landing from abroad, it’s next to impossible to identify the country of location of the caller. Moreover, of late a number of service providers in India have started providing VoIP solutions for making calls both domestics as well as foreign," the report quoted a communication sent by IB to the DoT.

If implemented, this may affect thousands of VoIP subscribers in India. There are around 34 companies providing VoIP service in the country.

It was in August 2008 the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) recommended the lifting of restrictions on Internet telephony in the country.

The recommendations under "Issues Related to Internet Telephony" permitted ISPs to provide unrestricted Internet telephony within the existing IUC regime.

TRAI had also permitted National Long Distance (NLD) operators to connect to ISPs through public Internet (Internet cloud) for unrestricted Internet telephony, on condition of mutual agreement between the ISPs and NLD operators for unrestricted Internet telephony.

However, the IB says that without a caller line identification, the origin of the caller or the country from which the call is originated cannot be found.

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