Police in India have made yet another raid on illegal VoIP operators and arrested 3 persons along with all the operating equipments in Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh. This is the sixth racket busted in the last six months.



Such arrests have been going on for some years now starting from the arrests made in Delhi a couple of years back.



Here, these illegal operators use VoIP and transfer international calls to local users. The benefit passes on to the caller, who gets charged for local calls only, while the telecom dept faces the loss.



According to the Telegraphic Act 1883 and Telegraphic Wireless Act 1935, all international calls from other countries should be routed through Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).



This is just about one city in India. Just imagine the number of illegal VoIP operators that may be operating all across the country especially in those states like Andhra Pradesh that has high overseas emigrants. The figure is simply immeasurable.



I had commented on a similar situation in Bangladesh where illegal VoIP operators are incurring losses worth hundreds of millions of taka to the state exchequer.



It is high time that such countries wake up to this reality and expedite the process of recognizing VoIP as a genuine telephony system and bring it under the regulatory field so that a mechanism can be put in place where the benefits can be reaped by the government and the citizens alike.



In India, though it is legal to make IP-based calls outside the country, it is still not legal to make calls to a local PSTN or a cellular network using VoIP. With Indian local long distance calls being still a costly affair, with the uniform flat rate still to be implemented,



I wonder how many VoIP operators are doing ‘public service’ on this.