"Mobile will become the single converged device for using voice, data and video, and will give an opportunity to reduce international long distance (ILD) call costs besides offering peer-to-peer calling free of cost. It will also allow services like owning phone numbers in other countries (like USA, UK, Canada, Singapore, Argentina) – which will ring on the mobile phones in India directly," Chatterjee adds.

Anubhuti Belgaonkar, managing analyst at Ovum, notes that given the Indian customers’ penchant for adopting low cost services, cheaper VoIP call tariffs and subsequent costs savings is expected to be the key factor that would drive the uptake of VoIP.

Ovum estimates that the consumer VoIP market in India (in subscriber terms) will grow at a CAGR of almost 74 percent to reach 6.5 million by 2014.

Anubhuti also feels that the growth prospects for VoIP services in India are quite good. And that if the constraints are removed it is expected to put further pressure on the already low voice tariffs in India.

However, she quips quickly, “Unless ISPs are allowed to interconnect with fixed and mobile service providers to enable VoIP services in the domestic market, VoIP is likely to have limited impact on the overall domestic tariffs.”

3G and 4G are just not enough?
Agreed that with 3G and 4G, Internet will be far more accessible, however, given the price sensitive nature of Indian market, where a major chunk of its mobile subscribers reside in the hinterland, it will take some more time for VoIP to come into the mainstream. 

"VoIP may find it challenging to attain a mass market status given the low Internet penetration in India and the overall slow growth of Internet services. Moreover, cost (such as services pricing and equipment/handset costs) remains a key factor in their (3G/WiMAX) subsequent adoption," says Anubhuti.

On a positive note, Sanjit observes that wireless is the way forward for Internet access and we will soon see more users adopting Internet over wireless than over wireline.

However, as of now, “The Indian consumer is missing the economics of VoIP and the option of getting better services on IP,” Sanjit sums it up.