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VoIP Legal Status Worldwide?
Cigarra writes "There was much public debate going on during the last several months here in Paraguay, regarding the 'liberation of Internet,' that is, the lifting of the restriction on ISPs to connect directly to international carriers. Up until this week, they were forced to hire wholesale service from the State run telco, Copaco. During the last month, when the new regulation was almost ready, the real reason supporting the monopoly made it to the headlines: Copaco would fight for the monopoly, fearing VoIP based telephony. Finally, the regulator Conatel resolved today to end the monopoly, but a ruling on VoIP legal status was postponed for 'further study.' I guess this kind of 'problem' arose almost everywhere else in the world, so I ask the international slashdotters crowd: what is VoIP's legal status in your country / state / region? How well did incumbent telcos adapt to it, and overall, just how disruptive was this technology to established operators?"
And now they're getting out of the VOIP business themselves.
Hopefully, this situation will help to drive the Bell Telephone Company of Canada into the ground, which could be sooner than we think as it was not bought by the Ontario Teacher's Fund.
VoIP is legal here in the United States.
But I don't know how much longer it'll be allowed to live by the ISPs.
We're kind of on a roller coaster ride debate as to whether or not ISPs should be able to decide what data goes over their lines. They want to be able to charge more for certain types of data (and you can bet your ass that data that competes with another wing of their business will be pretty damn expensive).
When Bush was in office, I wouldn't have even blinked in surprise if I were told suddenly the ISPs decided that all YouTube traffic is now set to 14.4k speeds unless you pay more for it, but now that Obama's in office, its actually a debate rather than a eventuality.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
The past tense of "arise" is "arose". Like rice.
Needless to say, the opportunity to make a fortune off of VoIP users is being lost. If you are a mobile operator, you just charge per packet. If you are a telco, you just charge a data traffic fee. If you are a cable operator, you just charge people more to get the channels that they really want by splitting them up into "packages" that contain one good channel and 50 crap channels.
Seriously, who the fuck is watching the Lifetime channel?
And we have regulators who would go after any telco who tried to block it.
In fact, many major ISPs are now offering VoIP as part of your Internet connection
If the government tried to ban VoIP in this country, they wouldn't survive the next election.
Maybe thats the problem for people in countries in Latin America and Africa and elsewhere where telephone and Internet service is controlled by state-run/state-backed monopolies. Maybe the people in these countries need to kick the government out (although that assumes that there is a government running the country and not a military general and an army with orders to shoot anyone who has such unclean thoughts as "lets kick the government out" or "lets fight the state-run telco")
Completely legal here - in fact, a lot of ISPs use it as a sales tool - they provide cheaper internet if you bundle it with their VoIP service to replace your home phone.
VoIPs becoming fairly widespread these days - many big companies especially are using it, and a growing proportion of home users.
Hardware VOIP phone device is definitely illegal is India. Software VOIP I am not sure.
People have VoIP in Australia with a publically accessible telephone number (inbound and outbound).
But what you're saying reminds me of mobile phone companies offering internet on 3G mobile phone networks but blocking IM clients fearing their exorbident SMS revenues will disappear.
In most of the Western world, Governments decided in the 1980's and 1990's that competition was good for the consumer, and government telecommunications monopolies no longer exist. In those countries, VoIP is just seen as a natural evolution of healthy competition, and though individual operators might try to make life difficult for independent VoIP operators, and lobby for regulations to be imposed based on E911 (ie the ability of emergency services to find), there is no government support for banning healthy competition.
In markets where there is still a government backed monopoly, there might be more inclination to protect that monopoly, but ultimately it is not good for the consumer or the overall economy to protect a dying technology and business model.
I see a lot of these new internet based communication technologies, that are pretty much 're-inventions' of existing industries, having a hard time setting their foot on the market.
Mainly because the industry they are replacing is too big to struggle with. And the big guys control access to the most important requirement, that is the Internet.
As long as cable companies serve internet, IPTV or P2P TV systems will have a hard time competing. The cable company will simply throttle your IPTV service, or they will roll their own, or just force you to use their existing TV technology.
Your phone line/DSL based ISP will make sure that your VOIP service is unreliable just to promote their 'cheap long distance plan' that comes with their 'high speed internet'.
In order to defeat these kinds of business models, we need independent ISPs. That is ISPs who only provide internet access and nothing else. These ISPs will have to make sure that their job is to improve their internet infrastructure to cater to the ever increasing bandwidth demand.
I personally want to see new companies providing wide area wireless internet access.
Say goodbye to the old, evil, traffic shaping, expensive, non-upgrading, money hungry, power hungry ISPs.
on the ISP's to run VOIP as much as it is a non-cost for the wireless carriers to run text messages? If that is the case, then I can see how it would be a great way to crush the telcos, but would that then be considered anti-competitive? So the only question then would be, how much of the money the ISP's charge us for doing nothing on there end, goes to the telcos as payment for dying off peacefully?
I will tell you when I am using VoIP and IM on my mobile handset. For now, it is only usable if I use my wired internet connection at home.
The telcos of the future are all wireless carriers, right?
Android, curiously, seems to lack support for it as well -- so much for Free(dom).
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
In the mean time, they screw over anyone still with a normal landline by moving to 30 second billing instead of per second billing.
They claim it was to bring it in line with the 30 second billing used with mobiles.
Well, they could have just as easily moved from 30 second billing to per second billing with mobiles.
Oh wait, they did have per second billing with some mobile plans at one point but they already got rid of that.
They are just greedy. At least Sol is finally going. Maybe they will get someone who realises that you cant run Australian companies the same way as they do in the USA. That is, by just stomping over the top of everyone.
It's completely legal with some cable companies offering cable + VoIP and several VoIP-only telecoms here. But most of the national VoIP providers are expensive when compared to Skype (about 2-3x more expensive). One of the reasons for that is taxes: telephony (and telecom in general) is taxed at 33%. Their only advantage is reliability for incoming calls when compared to SkypeIn.
In the early days of Skype, some ADSL providers tried to block Skype traffic in some places, it's actually not illegal for them to do that. But this only lasted for a few months as, presumably, people started switching over to cable companies (which were more than happy to grab yet another revenue stream from the telcos).
I believe my experience might be more relevant to you as Brazil and Paraguay are neighbor countries, so the context should be somewhat similar.
Residential User:
Mexico - Illegal if you don't buy from one of the Telmex concessionaires.
Nicaragua - Illegal. You go to jail for it.
Honduras - Illegal. Jail.
Costa Rica - Illegal. Fine.
Dominican Republic - Illegal. Jail.
Panama - Legal. Do whatever you want.
Colombia - Illegal. They disconnect your Internet line if they catch it.
Venezuela - Legal. Chaves Monopoly.
Brazil - Legal. Plenty of providers.
Argentina - Legal. Plenty of providers.
Chile - Legal. Plenty of providers.
Termination (to leak, connect a VoIP gateway to phone lines or ISDN lines and provide termination to guys like Arbinet):
Mexico: Illegal. Jail.
Nicaragua: Illegal. Fine and Jail.
Costa Rica: Illegal. Fine and Jail.
Honduras: Illegal. Fine and Jail.
Colombia: Illegal. Fine.
Dominican Republic: Illegal. Fine and Jail.
Venezuela: Illegal. Fine and Jail (and some worse stuff...)
Brazil: Illegal. Fine and Jail (They just closed a huge leak there with 12 Cisco 5350s. Guys got fined in 2 million bucks)
Argentina: Legal. You may get problems with your ISP.
Rest: I don't know.
VOIP international calls are legal but local calls are not as the state run companies and other private cos who have invested billions won't let so.
Also, routing of internationals calls as local calls are also not allowed.
VoIP need to be clarified here. Does it mean Voice that comes from IP network and terminates to PSTN? Or simply voice packets that travels through IP network and never touches PSTN?
Honestly, I don't see how any country can outlaw voice that never terminates to PSTN. Some countries might have national PSTN monopoly but if the packets never crosses to PSTN realm, how can you outlaw it? Voice packets are almost the same as any other IP packets. Heck, a SIP proxy can be set up in no time at all and most can support TLS connection these days. Couple with some SRTP and voila.. encrypted voice packets.
In Dubai in the UAE as well as in most Gulf countries, VoIP is completely illegal, and the state run telcos use DPI technology to block it. This adds about 200ms of latency to *all* packets which the telcos think is an acceptable tradeoff to preserve their monopoly revenue.
Legal, but the first bussiness did open a few years ago; telefonica wich was state run until recently and had ownership of all physical hardware and cabling all around the country did however boicot the capability of that bussisness to cope with demand, continuos DoS and numerous hardware misshandling from telefonica's forced the bussines to close, all of that happened under the table, legal afaik, but ethically cuestionable. Now there seems to be some VoIP operators, and that kind of behaviour had already been noticed by much more people as new ISPs had to rent infrastructure from telefonica and had somewhat a similar problem, looks like telefonica keeps now a low profile, the first VoIP operator didnt have that luck.
So for those countries that outlaw VoIP, what is the extent of their laws? If I play a game on Steam and it has voice chat as part of the game, will I be thrown in jail? If you play xbox live with the headset on, are you busted? If you use an IM which has voice capability is it illegal to turn that on?
Seriously, how can they make this work and still keep a functioning internet? This just seems like craziness to me.
d
all language nazi's will burne in heil!
VoIP will kill conventional telephones? That's just stupid. Cell phones will kill conventional telephones way before VoIP. I bet you that there are a lot more people with cell phones than there are with personal computers and internet connections.
I know people who were giving up their land lines years ago in the states and switching exclusively to their cells... I've yet to meet someone who has done the same with VoIP. (with out them owning a cell that is. I myself use VoIP for international calls and a cell for in-country here in Japan.)
all language nazi's will burne in heil!
The main telcos were supposed to get together to create a registry for ENUM records which would let New Zealanders use PSTN phone numbers over a VOIP service, but they were all conveniently distracted with the number portability task, that required the skills of everyone who would have been able to create an ENUM registry. Not surprisingly, number portability was done and no one was interested in getting started on the ENUM job. InternetNZ was supposed to be leading the charge, but for some reason they're not too interested either. VOIP is legal here, but there is little enthusiasm for integrating it with the PSTN network.
So, in Australia, we have a few serious competitors (eg, MyNetFone),
eg, offering low-cost ATA's (1-off price to buy it of under Au$ 20)
and VoIP service plans (to anyone who knows about them) as low as
Au$ 0 (ie, FREE) each month, ie, pay only for your calls ( Au$ 0.10
for up to 2 hours in each call you make to a normal Australian land-
line; Au$ 0.15 / min for calls to Aussie mobiles); 1 DID no. incl'd.
Retailers offer higher-priced ATA's (even from same VoIP provider),
or did... Most get ATA's directly from MNF at subsidized prices.
An early "visible" if more costly provider - Engine (or similar) -
wanted you to buy an ATA for Au$ 150 or Au$ 99, a while ago, but
have realised the futility of such high prices.
Engine also charged a monthly fee (now, about Au$ 10 / mon) plus
somewhat more for calls.
MyNetFone seems to have been the most creative & versatile, eg,
offering:
- software for Nokia cell phones that enable one to make/receive
calls either paying (high prices) for cellular privider's data
or - more recently & economically - use your choice of WiFi
provider (incuding your own home / office WiFi access-point)
as the (cheaper) source of data to support your VoIP calls
- support for softphones (theirs & others)
- cheap ATA's, some with routers WiFi and/or modems, ie, a reason-
able range of ATA brands & models, ususally locked to MyNetFone
- (for business clients) IP-PBX options (see their site for details)
Their low-cost call rates applied (as above), but any cell-pro-
vider's data or other broadband data costs were - as always -
yours to bear, along with them.
--- Skype on a mobile phone or Sony PSP or computer:
Mobile carrier (Hutcheonson?) "3" has offered Skype offers a
GSM-based cellphone with facilitated, built-in Skype features;
you can see it at Skype.com or Three.com.au.
With a SkypePhone in hand (a user who within range of "3"'s
broadband network can talk to any computer or Sony PSP or Skype-
phone based Skype-user... for 4,000 minutes / mon and/or sent
up to 10,000 text messages / month (in Skype text chat mode),
for an incredibly low monthly fee, even if you add-in a fee
for the SkypePhone handset. Of course, it's Skype- (not GSM-)
voice quality. But messages sent via Skype are NOT limited to
160 characters, as SMS chunks are.
Sony's PSP 3002 (AU-version) includes both WiFi & Skype (voice
only; neither SMS (since it's NOT a GSM cellphone) nor Skype
chat-mode text messages can be sent from a PSP).
If you bought a month or (cheaper, per mon) a year Skype "sub-
scription," you get 1 or 3 DID no.'s based in your choice of
any of 30+ countries, as well as 10,000 minutes of talk-time.
So, using such a subscription, you can ring any normal landline
number - in any of the countries on the list (of 32+ lands), etc.
Of course Skype-to-Skype calls & chat messages remain free. :-)
---
In short, enough options, easy for the end-user to setup & main-
tain (ie, if s/he's a bit of a geek).
In the C&W controlled monopoly islands of the english speaking Caribbean, VOIP was always a gray area. Anyone wanting to offer VOIP services required a telco license and C&W would not sell them an internet connection, but they did not block VOIP use by users. The Governments did not have any real stance on the issue as they did not understand it. Eventually, C&W accepted the inevitable and offered their own service, known as NetSpeak, but only to private users and only tied to a hardware device.
There is a large move to VOIP by companies and now I am seeing quasi-governmental pan-caribbean agencies implementing IP PBX installations using Open Source PBX equipment. The last bastion of TDM is the hotels and I think a shift to VOIP is inevitable there also.
The incumbent Telco will likely move to entertainment and content as long distance revenue dwindles and they are stuck with the losses of maintaining low return infrastructure. They are already slimming down operations, laying off staff and becoming a sales driven company rather than an engineering company.
VOIP will remain legal and radically change the Caribbean, telcos will become content providers and TDM will fade into the past.
CM www.cometenergysystems.com Blog: http://caribbeanrenewable.blogspot.com/
Ukraine: to sell VoIP services operators are required to buy a license. Without a license it's qualified as a "refile" and results in seizure of equipment and hefty fine.
I managed to omit the cost for GSM + Skype service on a SkypePhone
At intro of the SkypePhone (from Australian "3"), one could choose:
- 24 month Au$ 29 Cap" plan (then, with a min. spend of Au$ 20 / mon)
- buy a Skypephone & use it on a Pre-Paid basis: Min. Au$ 15 / mon
The "$29 Cap" has since changed to have a $29 min. spend (but includes
more GSM service, each month).
Aren't you forgetting about the Net Neutrality issues, that could (if not do)
disrupt VoIP for some Canadians?
CBC podcasts mention a coming / recent gov't consultation, in which ISP's are
demanding that Net Neutrality not burden them any more, in future.
If my US ISP knew I had some second hand IP-phones, a second hand computer for a TrixBox FOSS PBX, and a pay-as-you-go IAX/SIP trunk ($5 a month for local phone number, plus 2Â/min), you can bet they would TRY to shut me off since they also offer (crappy) VoIP service. But all I should have to do is say, "fine, I will take my business elsewhere" and they will roll over like a puppy if they care about surviving, anti-competitive-behavior arguments aside.
In the United States, VOIP is legal, and any decision that would change that is only vaguely hypothetical.
The basic idea here is to support "Net Neutrality", which prevents monopolies from discriminating between types of network traffic.
Anything else is just noise. The facts are that in most of the West, VOIP is perfectly legal and allowed. But if you want to help support that state of affairs, then mount a campaign to support Net Neutrality.
Conventional telephones are not going to die anyway because the obvious deliverer of fiber to the doorstep is the conventional telco. They might not seem to be doing so well right now but if they can invest enough in fiber to the home then they have their future cut out for them.
VoIP deployment for general telephony is used only as a transport medium for POTS. It will never blossom while that continues, and it will continue until users start handing out sip addresses (instead of telephone numbers.)
We have to exterminate telephone numbers to make VoIP truly live.
-- Newall
Here in France it is legal, except for wifi provider. Cellphone operators managed to get anti-concurrency laws about that. That's pretty stupid when one thinks about it.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Actually if Conventional telephone companies switch to delivering internet (fiber to the home), they they will care a lot less about losing their telephone business. They would rather have a single fiber line going to the house rather than a fiber and a twisted pair both. (more money for them to install and upkeep two lines).
The problem is that telephones have become so cheap in terms of data trafficing costs that i'm sure they're a major cash cow by now so it's hard for them to let things go. Of course countries that have strong state owned telephone company may have a harder time letting go, but any free country with high internet usage wouldn't need a conventional phones lines soon.
The telco's eventually would rather switch everybody to fiber/internet anyway so they'll just sell you your "landline" as a box they install off your property that converts their internet into VoIP anyway.
I don't see the reason that landlines can't just die. There's no "critical app" that keeps them rooted anymore. The only reason it's still here is legacy. In first world countries, it will die as soon as market penetration gets too low, and i think that'll happen in the next 10 or 20 years.
But as i said, cell phones will do the killing, not VoIP. More people have cell phones than have internet connections.
d
all language nazi's will burne in heil!
In Germany the mobile phone carriers charge a lot for normal phone services, but are starting to have cheap data plans. So their TOS don't allow for VOIP. There are 4 carriers. All of them do it.
Serbia and most of the other countries in Balkans: Legal since recently. My friend paid huge fine 2 years ago. State owned telco suited him for doing business "without them being involved" :)
Now it's all better, same day the law was introduced commercials were everywhere, cheap cheap cheap...
Well we here in Pakistan have had a smooth ride. We have been using VOIP for as long as we can remember and there has been no restriction that i know of .
Its another great disruptor technology IMHO.As bandwidth prices go down , better smart phones and yes MOIP technology gains ground it can give telcoms a run for their money.
I would say in all developed countries of relatively low corruption, it is legal. It did make the monopolists improve their business, but it didnt kill them. Most people are using mobile phones anyway (in China, they do that without a fixed line).
Legal in:
Norway,
Denmark,
Finland,
Germany,
Switzerland
Holland,
Belgium,
France,
UK,
Spain
Portugal
Italy
Pakistan
Japan
US
Australia
The rest I dont know, but it is very easy to guess
Illegal in India (at least international)
Consumers are allowed to buy VoIP equipment and use it as they please. Broadband quality isn't all that great, and latency to the USA (where most providers are homed) is 250+ms, so takeup has not been huge. Skype is popular though, and USB Skype accessories are ubiquitous in computer malls and shops.
Equipment that connects physically to the telephone network requires approval from SIRIM, a regulatory agency. I have seen SIRIM-approved stickers on Digium cards, so in principle they are amenable to that sort of thing. I know of one shop that sells SPA-3000 series devices but I haven't checked whether those are officially approved or just grey-market imports.
A licence is required in order to interconnect with the PSTN and provide services to the public. However, many of the inbound international phone calls I receive here in Malaysia arrive with dubious local caller-ID, so I suspect there are a lot of termination providers doing things on the cheap, which in these parts usually means skipping the licence stuff.
In general, the government's attitude has been open or at least tolerant, and the market is slowly picking up speed. All of the major ISPs offer or plan to offer consumer VoIP service, and a small but growing number of independent operators are starting to reach out to consumers. For large businesses it has been standard practice for years.
One factor slowing the adoption of VoIP has probably been the already-low price for international calls via other means. Wholesale inbound termination is under US$0.01/minute for fixed lines, and around US$0.03/minute for mobiles. The retail cost of phone calls from Malaysia to fixed lines in US/Europe/Australia etc on my mobile is around US$0.04/minute (Digi @ RM0.13-0.18). In most countries you can't even call next door for that price; here I can call the other side of the planet.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
The fundamental telco problem is that they were founded on a profit model based on time/distance. You paid more for more time and more for more distance, essentially renting a circuit. IP is modelled on you pay for how fat your pipe (or tube ;-) ) is and how much you put through it, and time/distance are completely irrelevant.
No national telco anywhere seems to have come up with a solution to this, so they try to hold back the tide by arbitrary control over IP content.
They make me think of drunks who don't realise the brewery is now shut.
Jerry
But that is my whole point. If they can leverage their existing infrastructure to the point of delivering fiber to the home (FIOS), then they do indeed have a future. Otherwise, they probably do not. So... they should be pushing fiber with every dollar they have.
I've traveled to Costa Rica and Argentina for multiple weeks and used VoIP in both those countries.
If it is illegal in Costa Rica, they certainly don't tell anyone. I stayed in private homes with DSL, not a holiday inn.
I know the state runs the telecom/DSL in Costa Rica, so while VoIP may be unknown to the average Tico, they certainly aren't blocking it. Pura Vida!
From what I have seen, the telcos know they can not win against VOIP, so since all of them are offering some form of high speed, they are also moving to offer voice services over the Internet service they provide.
This means that you can get VOIP from your ISP, the phone companies also offer Internet service, and VOIP over what they offer. The only problem is that ISPs may weight IP traffic for their own VOIP higher than other traffic, meaning companies like Vonage may have degraded service compared to what the ISP offers.
VOIP is actively encouraged by the authorities, however there is very little reason to use it as PSTN is so cheap, and more reliable.
Most people use cellphones for voice calls, as they are cheaper / more convenient than land lines. One of the mobile networks provides facilities for you to use Skype over their network, but it doesn't work as well as a standard UMTS voice call.
I think VOIP is popular in some countries because they have an arbitrage situation where data is cheaper than voice. There is no real reason why this should be the case, and in a free market, you should expect voice traffic to fall to the same price as data traffic, and VOIP to disappear.
Congratulations for abusing moderation in order to try to bury my opinion which is contrary to yours. A troll is when you say something you don't believe to try to elicit a particular response. This is not what is happening here.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Plus, most internet tends to go through DSL or Cable. In this country and I suspect in most others you can't get either of those without also having a landline (kinda obvious for DSL, but for Cable it's built into the contract).
I know of nobody who uses VOIP for their main line. I do know several who have only mobiles (and also use mobile internet, which is getting very popular despite low data caps).
In Poland and EU currently there is no problem with VoIP. There are a lot of companies in EU that support Poland and some Polish companies specialized in Poland. Funny thing is that regular telecommunication companies (like Dialog Telecom -monthly subscription about 10Euro/20USD) sell also their products cheaper via internet wih VOIP (monthly subscription about 2,5Euro/5USD).
In the past polish national telecomunication had monopoly for calls abroad, till 2004 i belive, but nobody respected it.
In Lebanon, VoIP is actually completely illegal as it circumvents what is in some cases, a state run monopoly, and in other cases, a multi-national firm that's been granted authority to be a monopoly by a ridiculous agreement Lebanon made with the IMF (typical privatization/guarantee of private profits in exchange for a high interest loan). I wouldn't be surprised if most of the developing world is in the same boat...
In The Bahamas...
It is claimed that VOIP (say vonage) is illegal. Two local telco's supposedly provide legal voip. One is the government owned former telco monopoly.
all the best,
drew
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
Government Internet Monopoly name: BelTelecom
Personal usage of VOIP is Ok.
Providing/selling VOIP service: Fine and Jail.
"Arised"? Please. I know the editors here aren't famed for their intelligence, but they could at least try using actual words.
Here in the middle-east countries known as the GCC (Gulf cooperation council) the status is mostly forbidden if it's cross border with slight variation from country to country. Bahrain being the most open (also to prostitution, boozing and pork sandwidch but that's another story).
In the UAE (Abu dhabi, Dubai) it's ok inside the country. For example a company wishing to connect it's branches on one IP network. Using skype/sip to call outside the country is forbidden as it requires a telco license, which is a state monopoly. They've tried to multiple time to block skype and for a while they were filtering non-encrypted SIP INVITE packet. But since they let VPN and SSL+SIP go through everyone still does it and I work with many companies who have their own cross border VoIP network. I myself sometime use SIP trunk provider from canada or europe to reduce my cost. There is no way to get a SIP trunk inside those countries, and you're happy is you can even get a DSS1 PRI and not some backward CAS line.
It all boils down to telco's (that's the state for you) being scared shitless of the loss in revenue and more importantly *control* that they have no idea what to do and how to go about it.
Most other country are the same, with Saudi not having the infrastructure to cope with that technology anyway. It's not blocked. It's just the latency is so bad it's going to be mostly useless. You could go for a dish but it's not really discreet.
Bahrain is the one exception, along with Jordan and possibly Yemen. Bahrain is strapped for cash (no real oil, little gas, small island.. etc) that they just allow everything and anything that may attract some businesses and turn a blind eye to the rest. We do call this place sin-city around here. Jordan has always been the most progressive ME country and a favored US partner, they need business and will do what's needed to accommodate. I suspect Jordanian actually have a clue what they are doing which does seem so obvious in Bahrain.
Here in holland, VOIP is free and inexpensive. With my ADSL account I received two VOIP-numbers, and a wireless ADSL router (Thompson 780) to which you can connect two analog phones. Calling another VOIP number is free, calling any other landline within the country costs € 0,02 a minute; calling a (Dutch) mobile is € 0.16 a minute. Foreign numbers are from € 0,02 (most of Europe; USA) to € 1,00 per minute.
Here in Dominican Republic is ilegal if you try to do business with VOIP, now most TELCOS are selling VOIP Solutions. Sometimes ISP block VOIP ports.
Here Indotel (the FCC of DR) just let big companies do whatever they want.
The last thing the bigger telco company (CODETEL) here do was to block all the phone lines to another smaller VOIP Provider (DIGITEC - a legal VOIP Provider), and thousands users with DID Numbers of DR, including people that use DID with Skype outside of DR was affected.
I call this a telecommunication dictatorship.
Since couple of years ago it's not uncommon to get VoIP phone from you ISP in addition to the Internet connection.
Many people choose to move since it's now also possible to take your previous phone number and migrate it to the new line. And that's independent of the fact if you stay with the service provider or move to a new one.
Your fixed number can follow you and you never need to change it. The same goes for the mobile numbers, but that's besides the point.
The landline monopoly, Ittisalat Al Maghrib, which is also the only land-based broadband provider (DSL) does not look kindly on VOIP resellers. There are some underground VOIP resellers but they get shut down and arrested if they are caught.
This doesn't stop the well-off people to have a secondary vonage (or similar) landline for calling abroad but it does discourage any competition on the local level.
Probably been said above, but completely legal in Australia and actually, VoIP has a very high market penetration here compared to the US from what I can tell.
I, and most of my friends, have no traditional PSTN voice service at all. We physically have the landline there, but there's no dialtone. It's just for DSL (so called 'Naked DSL').
There's half a dozen big Australian VoIP services out there which offer very cheap call rates ... simply sign up to one of those, whack the relevant SIP settings in your router and you are good to go. Some ISPs offer you a discount if you bundle their VoIP service with your DSL service.
The killer feature for me, other than low cost calls, is that you can choose a local phone number (or multiple numbers) in different cities which is fantastic if you have relatives scattered far and wide ... they can call you for local call cost). Software solutions like Skype offer this too I believe (SkypeIn numbers).
In Guyana, we have a very similar issue. We have a situation where we have one major telcom provider and they have a monopoly on the VOIP Sector. As such we are left in their hands to grant us access. They have decided that it cost them lost of revenue to them
Michael Dabydeen
We are setting up and building VoIP servers and infrastructures no matter what here in Paraguay, and we are going to use FreeSWITCH and FOSS solutions.
There is no law specifically against VoIP in Honduras yet...A law proposal exists, but hasn't been ratified, that deals with this issue.
But, that didn't stop the government monopoly Hondutel from using the district attorney's office to dismantle perfectly legal VoIP companies, accusing them of contraband international VoIP. Local VoIP calls are OK, but Hondutel alleged that since the law didn't say anything about VoIP, and specifically, international VoIP, it was illegal.
Several of the victimized companies sued the government, and after more than a year and millions of dollars in losses, won the cases.
The current government is very protectionist and corrupt. Caveat emptor.
In India, computer to computer voice/video calls are legal. But a computer to landline/cellphone (in India) call is illegal as of now. Some people are lobbying hard to get that legalized but the incumbent telco cartel (Airtel, Vodafone, Reliance) is lobbying back equally hard to block it.
Funny thing, the government owned big player (BSNL) is least bothered by it. They have a gung ho attitude about anything and everything.
This means that people who provide termination services for Skype and the like are operating in a grey/black area.
I don't know that there was much issue about independent VOIP companies such as Vonage. But when the cable companies requested the right to sell local phone VOIP service over to there existing internet-over-cable-line network to TV subscribers... there was a lot of complaints from the telephone companies.
I don't really know the exact ruling... but now we have the cable company selling VOIP and the telephone company selling digital TV (via ADSL or something I guess)
I think this worked out for the best for the consumer... as our main telephone provider began slashing rates for basic service once the competition began. Both telephone and cable companies are making lots of profit.,, so I guess this made sense economically as well.
One negative aspect about this deregulation for me personally was 'anti-competitive behaviour' by my cable company: Shaw. I originally had Internet lite which is a cheap internet package from the cable company. I was using Vonage as my VOIP provider and all worked fine. However, once Shaw introduced their own VOIP service... they reduced the Internet quality of my packets and my Vonage service became unusable. When I called them, they said that I would have to pay them a higher monthly fee for a quality-of-service package. This is absolute BS in my opinion and they know it. They were just trying to stifle Internet competition by making their service appear more price competitive then it really was.
For this reasons (above paragraph) I really hope your country looks into "net-neutrality laws" which would prevent your ISP's from reducing quality or completely cutting-off online service which directly compete with their own offerings.
Note: the above comments come from a personal usage perspective. I haven't the foggiest about any of the real laws.
Right now the only voip available is skype or LG Dacom's voip that I can tell. There are issues with both magic jack and vonage, however with magic jack it seems that changing the port number should work.
Those who live by the sword, get shot by those who live by the gun...
I use exclusively DSL communication. It' delivered on a conventional telephone wire, but it has no option of using an analog phone.
My provider rents the two kilometers of wire to my home from the former state phone company. I have no idea how much they pay though.
Actually if Conventional telephone companies switch to delivering internet (fiber to the home), they they will care a lot less about losing their telephone business. They would rather have a single fiber line going to the house rather than a fiber and a twisted pair both. (more money for them to install and upkeep two lines).
It costs them zero to upkeep phone lines. All costs were from the initial investment of laying the cables to properties. That's the problem. Just because they put down wires as a state monopoly decades ago, the phone companies have control over practically every residential customer. And laying down new cables everywhere is not a realistic option.
The telco's eventually would rather switch everybody to fiber/internet anyway so they'll just sell you your "landline" as a box they install off your property that converts their internet into VoIP anyway.
While I don't fully comprehend what you mean, this sounds like what most providers do anyway. At their telephone stations they convert their digital fiber-based communication (both internet connection and their own telephone service) to DSL frequencies and analogue phone calls. They feed them into a filter, which you then split at your home and send to your phone and DSL modem.
I don't see the reason that landlines can't just die. There's no "critical app" that keeps them rooted anymore.
Judging from my provider's performance, I'd say we need minimum reliability requirements by law before we consider abandoning analog telephones. And there is still practically no consumer hardware that supports QOS.
The only reason it's still here is legacy. In first world countries, it will die as soon as market penetration gets too low, and i think that'll happen in the next 10 or 20 years.
As long as we still have technophobes and customers with more money than knowledge, the phone companies will continue to provide the service described above as it costs them very little on their modern infrastructure.
But as i said, cell phones will do the killing, not VoIP. More people have cell phones than have internet connections.
The cell phone oligopoly will, in turn, be replaced by other wireless internet providers. Their roaming and text messaging charges make the old state monopolies look cheap.
The sooner we are charged depending on the actual expense to the provider, the better. At the moment we only have business models specifically designed to milk customers and stifle competition.
The ministry of communication (MoC) owns the business of International calls and the sole entity that is allowed to reach Internet Service Providers outside the borders of the country.
This means that all local ISPs have to rent from the MoC the ability to reach ISPs in United Arab Emirates (UAE) & Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA).
The MoC bans VoIP in houses and companies and should an ISP find that you use one, your contract will be terminated. (Though they don't really check houses, yet)
Just recently the MoC started using VoIP itself to cut costs.
There are VoIP International phone-call shops that are setup to make cheap calls, but soon they get closed when busted.
Can we put all these status in a wiki?
HTH
Oliver
Get my e-mail after a captcha test in: http://tinymailt
Wikipedia Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_the_United_Arab_Emirates#Broadband_Internet_access
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etisalat#Internet_Censorship
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Du_(telco)#Censorship
The two government-owned ISPs have generally blocked access to Skype, and some other wlel-known VOIP providers - however, the censorship is sporadic. Half of the Skype site is inaccessible, the other half is fine. VOIP traffic is sometimes blocked, sometimes allowed. Amusingly, when the SanDisk Cruzer (USB drive) went on sale here, it included installable copies of Skype. ( http://www.sandisk.com/Products/Item(2645)-SDCZ6-016G-A11-SanDisk_Cruzer_Micro_16GB_Black.aspx )
VOIP is not directly hindered here in Sweden although the former state monopoly and the current parastatal monopoly has been a consistent antagonist to broadband development. This is of course a consequence of it being in control of the infrastructure in use and to whom you, i e other companies, need to apply for admission e g to get into the base stations. Also the conservative government in Sweden is haphazardly trying to regulate and monitor Internet traffic as well as all other public communications. The debate has gone wild and personal integrity is losing ground by the hour as the multinational companies are choking states and democracies to comply to their marketing strategies and tactics referring to outdated legislation and practices; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGpJH5-MjtQ. The forefront runners to attack and challenge this legislation and in fact sheer idiocracy are the guys behind thepiratebay who are courageously and with fortitude fighting for this upright cause; http://trial.thepiratebay.org/