NEW DELHI: The Department of Telecommunication (DoT) is likely to mandate license for offering messenger based telephony services in the country soon.

After the South Korean government imposed a ban on Skype, it is now Indian government's turn to act on the telephony services being offered by a number of service providers. According to the guidelines, Internet telephony services can be offered in India either by an ISP specifically permitted to do so or by a unified access service licensee.

The Internet Service Providers Association of India (ISPAI) in a letter to DoT dated July 13, had stated that most of the service providers do not possess requisite license are offering telephony service across the country. Currently, service providers such as Skype, Net2Phone, Yahoo! and MSN are offering Internet telephony in India.

The Department is serious on the issue. DoT officials said that it has come to their notice that a number of service providers are offering log-distance calls through the Internet telephony at local call rates.

“It is a of national security issue as no monitoring is being done on it as stated to us by the ISPs. We are working on it and will come up with something concrete in a short time,” a DoT official said.

DoT had put a hold on applications of 18 ISPs seeking license for offering Internet telephony. The list of companies whose applications have been put on hold includes Sify, DSL Internet and Spectranet.

The ISPs were initially willing to offer Internet telephony free of cost but from January 2006, the government has imposed a fee to offer this service.

The ISPs have also pointed out that such services being offered free of cost is loss of government revenue.

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