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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.
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?
But PORT 1234567890 to let airtel know what we feel about it.
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."
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
Will be difficult for Skype to take this risk - they aren't that big in India. But I bet that if WhatsApp blocks Airtel IPs for just 1 days, airtel would see 100% of their users typing up airtel's customer service lines to ask why they cannot access WhatsApp. But I doubt if WA has the guts to try something like this.
Particularly since Whatsapp is a part of FaceBook, and the main reason that the Internet's popularity has exploded in India is FaceBook, YouTube and Twitter, if FaceBook tells Airtel that it will block Airtel IPs from not just Whatsapp but FaceBook servers as well, that will bring Airtel to its knees. The last thing they want to do is lose their #1 or #2 spot to a Reliance or Tata or anyone else just for this reason.
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
Service is pretty much the best out there. Dunno how you got this experience. I called them once my fiber broadband wasn't working at 1 am in the night and they sent a technician in 2-3 hours. Others probably won't even receive your call.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
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.
This is the wrong way to think about this. We have had 'Facebook' plans and 'Whatsapp' plans. They do not violate net neutrality because they do not offer internet access. Now, Airtel says that the 'Internet' plans will not cover Whatsapp, Skype, Viber, etc. This is a net neutrality violation.
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.