Indian Minister Says Telecom Companies Should Only Charge For Data

bhagwad writes "In the US, telecom carriers are trying their best to hold on to depleting voice revenues. Over in India, the telecom minister urged carriers to stop charging for voice calls and derive all their revenues only from data plans. Is this kind of model sustainable, where voice becomes an outmoded and free technology, and carriers turn entirely into dumb pipes which have no control over what passes over them? This is a step forward and hopefully will make Internet service more like a utility."

Comments

In coming calls are free in India.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

According the the law, the phone companies can not charge for airtime of incoming calls. Most people use prepaid phones, with just enough money to keep the phone active. But they would not dial out any calls. Many very poor people use these phones. Street vegetable vendors, unofficial jitney taxis, servant maids, low paid gate security fellas. ...

And they have developed some social customs regarding "missed call etiquette". Typically it is understood that you never accept a call from certain classes of people, drivers, maids, delivery boys etc. They call, let it ring once, and they hang up. You return the call. Sometimes I have answered these calls and they would go, "Sir, why did you answer the call? I was giving you a missed call, sir". Usually I give them a few rupees to make amends.

Very typical conversation is:

"Mom, going to the dance class".

"OK, dear, do give me a missed call as soon as you get there"

Re:subsidize phone calls

[Anonymous Coward]

Not if they have a modern network, and are honest. Modern networks are completely ip on the inside. Price to customer pr megabyte of voice traffic is approximately 100x that of the same volume on a data plan.
But note that carriers production cost on data is very high nowadays, due to very large build costs. Don't know about India, but in western networks data usage have been growing by about 80-90% year-over-year the last few years - that is, exponentially. Revenue is only increasing in the low double digits, far lower than cost. Equipment cost is also falling, but not quickly enough. In the long run this is unsustainable. That's the reason for the more restrictive data plans and price hikes you have been seing the last few years. For many carriers, voice is susidizing data right now.

Source: I'm technical management at a large telco.

Re:subsidize phone calls

[hairyfeet]

Hell I recently read an article (sorry I didn't think to save the bookmark) that MSFT was doomed in the mobile space precisely because the carriers don't want competition from Skype and are punishing MSFT for buying it by refusing to give WinPhone the same push and deals they do with the Droid phones. Considering how badly they screw you on voice and data? Certainly sounds believable to me.

This is why the whole "pushing smartphones" frankly scares the living hell out of me, AT&T in my area has pretty much stopped bothering to add so much as a single foot or Mbps to their DSL offerings and are instead pushing cell phones where they can make insane profits and the cableco has decided to simply gouge the customers they have instead of adding more customers and running lines. Imagine a world where you can't get on the net except with a smartphone with no tether ability? Makes the carriers happy, they can gouge away, makes the content owners happy, you won't have enough bandwidth to do anything that would piss them off, but it would royally suck for the users as you'd be stuck on these crappy little screens with no hope of getting anything better.