Cheap Calls

IF web pages, email and music can travel over the Internet, so can voice. Some years ago, a company called Net2Phone, located outside New York, made it possible for people to make phone calls using a PC to any phone on earth, just as long as the PC was connected to the net. The cost of making the phone call was way below what your phone company would have charged you. If you could find some way to pay Net2Phone, the company would give you a tiny piece of software to download and run on your PC, along with a password that would make it possible for you to make these cheap phone calls. In essence, it was like ordering a pre-paid card. Once the payment had been consumed, the password became ineffective. There were a bunch of people in New Delhi, who have their cousins and uncles and brothers in the United States to make the payment, load the password and software on to a floppy, and mail it to them in India. A large, clandestine business quickly took root. The problem was that the sound quality of the calls was iffy and often, because this was not a duplex connection meaning, only one person could speak at a time, the conversations sounded painful. Above all, this 8212;IP telephony 8212; was illegal.

But it was obvious that the government would have to bend soon and make IP telephony legal. And it has. Now, Internet Service Providers like Net4India, Caltiger, NOW will sell you a connection that can, in some cases, help you make international phone calls at less than Rs 5 a minute. You can make PC to PC calls or PC to phone calls. Of course, quite a few people are already jabbering away with one another across continents using the voice ability of Instant Messengers from MSN and Yahoo! But Instant Messengers only work PC to PC 8212; not PC to phone what if your cousin in Venezuela doesn8217;t have a PC connected to the Net?.

The drawback with IP telephony currently is that although you can make cheap international calls using the net, you cannot reach about 42 million basic and mobile phone subscribers in the country! So, making a cheap net call from Delhi to someone in Mysore is out of the question. It8217;s a policy restriction which, sooner, rather than later, is bound to go.

The author is Station Director, Radio City, 91 FM, Bangalore