IP telephony set to boom with new telecom regulation

BANGALORE: Internet telephony in India could get a solid boost with the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) notifying approval for “logical partitioning” of public switched telephone network (PSTN) and Closed User Group (CUG) networks.

PSTN refers to circuit-switched telephone networks that carry voice data. This includes mobile as well as fixed lines while CUG refers to a network of users who belong to a company or a particular group using IP telephony.

The notification, which was sent to service providers a few weeks ago, is a reversal of the department's directive, which had hitherto disallowed users from installing a single phone that can separate calls from PSTN network from CUG calls. The reason was that this amounted to toll bypass. The idea behind this regulation was to ensure fair play between different market segments. This was a dampener for the enterprises since CUG allows workforce across a company to make VoIP calls from anywhere at rates that are cheaper than the standard leased line rates.

With the recently announced deregulation, enterprises, service providers, application software developers as well as Internet telephony vendors have a lot of reason to rejoice. Corporate users now can slash down the investment that goes into setting up networks. “Typically corporates would have to install two parallel networks for PSTN and CUG which had no interconnect. But with logical partitioning, they would have not parallel network infrastructure but one single IP-PBX that can allow PSTN and CUG,” explained Rajesh Shetty, regional manager-ITS, Cisco Systems India.

The new regulation allows from PSTN to PSTN and CUG TO CUG calls, but not PSTN to CUG and vice-versa. Shetty contends that full convergence would take more time.

He said that banks, the manufacturing sector and retail could be some of the sectors which would take to internet telephony in a big way. Last year, Cisco shipped 100,000 IP phones in India, with most deployments being in IT and ITES companies and major banks.

The concept of IP contact centers could also gain traction. Datamonitor projects that by 2009, there will be over 2.6 million IP agent positions, which would account for 37 percent of the overall global total.

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