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India Faces Its First Major Net Neutrality Issue
New submitter Siddharth Srinivas writes Bharti Airtel Ltd, India's largest telecommunications carrier by subscribers, will soon start charging users extra money for using services such as Skype, as Indian operators look to boost their data network and revenues. The Telecom Regulation Authority of India (TRAI) is no stranger to Net Neutrality, having sent a note to the ISPs in 2006 suggesting a position for Net Neutrality. TRAI had also recently rejected a proposal by Airtel and other operators the right to charge for free services such as Whatsapp. Consumers await TRAI's response to Airtel's new pricing. With no laws enforcing net neutrality in India. India's Net Neutrality discussions have just begun, with proponents rapidly trying to increase awareness.
Using Internet through a VPN should prevent operators to figure out which site/port you are using (and DNS as well if name resolution goes through the VPN as well).
This until many people are on a VPN and operators will start to charge VPN usage...
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
As a soon-to-be ex-customer of this telecom giant, I'm doing the two things I can: Raising an almighty stink in all the channels I know, and obviously voting with my pocket by ditching them. Any other ideas would be welcome. I fear this is just the level-1 boss we're fighting against in the war against internet equality.
We need to start a campaign to stop this kind of high handed ness. Do anything possible to reduce their revenue. The problem is that they own a substantial part of the 3g/4g spectrum. I regret the day the spectrum got auctioned away.
Simply outsource all your internet needs to third world africa!
India has earlier enabled an easy way to change the mobile service provider wothout needing to fulfil any contracts.
It is called Mobile Number Portability.
Simply send a text message(sms)
PORT
To 1909
If Airtel wants you to stay, their customer care will call you - tell them tostop charging for Skype, Google Talk, Viber and Whatsapp traffic over the regular data pack costs.
Airtel India today has decided to charge it's customers extra on usage of each GB of data for VoIP(voice calls over Internet).
On the 3G network, each GB of VoIP will cost about Rs 4,000 and while the same on the 2G network will cost about Rs 10,000.
Dear Logical Indians, we believe that the neutrality of the internet must be maintained at all costs. It is unethical to charge extra for data used to make voip calls via Viber, Skype etc. If you agree with us, please email the below to the addresses mentioned.
___________________________________
Mail to: ravis@sansad.nic.in,
CC: ap@trai.gov.in, secretary@trai.gov.in, ceo.direct@bharti.com, sbm@bharti.com, Gopal.Vittal@in.airtel.com
To,
The Honorable Minister, Department of Telecommunications.
Subject: Gross Violation of Net Neutrality and Restrictive Business Malpractice by Airtel India.
Dear Sir,
It has come to our attention today that â#âZAirtelâ has decided to start charging for VOIP data traffic on all Subscribed Internet Plans.
Let Airtel know how you feel. Doesn't matter if you ultimately switch to another provider or not. Initiate porting by sending SMS.
SMS to: 1900
SMS body: PORT
example:
Send
PORT 9623456789
to 1900
This is initial step of porting. By doing this airtel will know you are willing to switch to some other provider. If you get a callback explain them why you are switching.
You can't say "We provide Internet access!" and then deny access to a range of TCP/UDP port numbers. You might be able to say "Web connectivity!" (and I have no problem with this), but not Internet.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
Their service is the crappiest ever from what I have experienced plus many others. Frequent disconnection with no service representative to attend your call when that happens which is thrice a week. Left Airtel two years back, never going back. Boycott Airtel is the way to go.
Hileli apk indir
This is like buying a car then paying a fee every time someone starts the motor.
Two can play that game: Microsoft servers can simply ignore an IP address until the ISP owning it pays Microsoft a connection fee.
If Microsoft and friends don't have their servers in India, they can disconnect the country until all ISPs pay. Unfortunately, that also allows a competitor into a very big market.
But PORT 1234567890 to let airtel know what we feel about it.
Close and don't show me this again dammit!
If Skype is the issue, a lot depends on how the provider intends to block it. Some sites just block port 5060 (IIRC), leaving the user free to configure his Skype client to use port 80. If the ISP tries to block that, there will probably be one or two complaints.
Wanting to charge for WhatsApp was predictable. In fact, I predicted it.
Globally (and a large chunk of it was in India), the SMS carriers lost about $9B to WhatsApp. This is why Facebook was willing to pay $18B to acquire it, since they wanted leverage over the carriers in those countries to force Internet access, because Facebook lives or dies by Internet access of its users. It's the same reason Google has so many initiatives to extend Internet access everywhere.
The carriers have lost a large chunk of their SMS revenue, and Skype is converting a lot of their voice traffic to Internet traffic, and they are therefore losing money on that too. So they want to add fees for use of Skype to make up for origination, connection, call completion, and time-on-call fees which are going away as Indian users are discovering that if they have Skype to talk to people internationally, and the other person in India that they want to talk to has Skype to talk to people internationally, why, they can use Skype to *talk to each other* and cut out all the middleman fees for virtual circuit switching services.
Telecom companies are quickly becoming the vendors of dumb pipes, with their only service level differentiator being what diameter of pipe you are able to get. And they very much do not like this. This is why we have things like data caps with huge overage charges, and video services that the carrier gets paid by the video, and it doesn't cost you against your data cap, but if you use someone else's video service, it costs you.
And so they are fighting net neutrality tooth and nail, because their revenue streams are drying up.
The really, really ironic thing is that if the telecommunications company had deployed these technologies themselves, they could have fit them into their existing tiering, and kept the majority of the profits that are now flying out their window. They would have had a reduced income stream, to be sure, but they would have had it, instead of it going to some third party.
Expect Microsoft and Facebook to spend heavily to defeat these measures.
Between data caps and getting charged for various services imagine how expensive your phone is going to become, especially now that you use it for everything, talking, messaging, banking, shopping, and all the other things people do on their phones.
They will make you dependent on your phone (they already have) and then they will bleed you.
Just remember, we had a chance to put an end to this, and posting your nerd rage to Facebook isn't the way to do it.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I recently read an article which said that Net Neutrality was already not there for many years in India.
Facebook & WhatsApp are the 2 biggest things in India. They are the 2 killer apps because of which people get a smart phone. For many years, a lot of telcos have cheap plans which provide only Facebook & WhatsApp access but no other data access. Some have plans which allow unlimited WhatsApp data but not any other kind of data.
Zuckerberg even launched an initiative in India called internet.org to provide 100% free access to only FB. This wasn't an add-on to another plan but a full free basic internet access to FB (and may be Google search).
No one talked about net neutrality with all this because this was cheaper than regular plans not more expensive.
But now with the first time that a non-neutral plan is more expensive, net neutrality has become a trending topic.
So you're gonna tell the minister how to port his phone# to another carrier? He probably doesn't care. Nowhere in the letter did I see any reference to protesting and asking the GOI to make it illegal to charge separately for such services
All those internet jobs that went to India because labor is cheaper there and blah blah blah. Please, lets tax the skype that is used on all of those worthless help desks. I am all right with that.
if they fail to do real net neutrality, then we can point at them and say 'do you really want to be like india?' and hope that the fcc actually realizes how much we need net neutrality
TRAI is supporting Airtel's move. As per TRAI Airtel did not do anything wrong legally as there are no rules in India regarding net neutrality.
Until they get better next time at not dying. That's the way that England eventually reached a stalemate that is called the royal family. Dukes and Princes no longer kill Kings.
do it with extreme violence and put all on video
I guess you are confusing India with Pakistan?
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
They are not supporting, they are saying we need a directive, otherwise Airtel's move is legal.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.