February 20, 2002
'24'
TRAI GIVES ITS RECOMMENDATIONS TO THE GOVT. ON THE INTRODUCTION OF INTERNET TELEPHONY TODAY
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India today gave its recommendations to the Govt. on the Introduction of Internet Telephony in the country. The guiding principle in making these recommendations is to promote competition, with a view to giving greater choice to the consumers for telecom services and to provide a technology neutral network platforms to operators, with adequate safeguards relating to Quality of Service.
2. A synopsis of the recommendations is given below:
The Authority has recommended that Internet Telephony should be opened up from 1st April’2002.
The Authority has defined Internet Telephony as an Application Service which the customers of ISPs can avail from their Personal Computers (PC) capable of processing voice signals. The scope of service includes the following type of connections:
The Authority has recommended that the existing facility based operators such as BSOs, CMSOs, NLDOs be permitted the option to deploy VOIP based backbones for providing various services as specified in their respective licenses, subject to meeting specified quality of service norms. It should have a minimum Mean Openion Score (MOS) of 4 on a scale of 1 to 5.
To provide greater flexibility to operators and more options to customers the Authority has recommended that in addition to toll quality telephony service the facility based operators be permitted to also offer a lower than toll quality telephony service for customers who can accept some degradation in voice quality by engineering a separate VOIP based backbone accessible by a different service code. The Authority has specified a minimum QOS for this service, i.e. MOS for this type service can be less than 4 but greater than 3.
It has been recommended that Internet Telephony through PCs or IP based terminals should be made available also through the Public Tele Info Centre (PTIC) and Internet Kiosks at Sanchar/ Cyber Dhabbas for the benefit of those who do not own the Customer Premises Equipment required for the service. This will make Internet Telephony an integral part of the USO programme on which the Authority has already given its Recommendations, and which includes provision of PTICs as an essential element, to help address the issue of Digital Divide.
The Authority has recommended the Quality of service for VOIP based networks shall be of two types. One the `toll quality’ with a MOS of 4 and above on scale of 1 to 5 and the second being lower than toll quality with an MOS of less than 4 but greater than 3.
The Authority has recommended that Telecom Engineering Centre (TEC) should issue detailed guidelines for monitoring of voice quality by both objective as well as subjective methods of monitoring of QOS. It is also recommended that a high level technical committee under the aegis of TRAI with participation of experts from TEC and industry to be set up to carry out an in-depth study of QOS and interoperability issues.
The Authority has recommended that the tariff for toll quality service offered by facility based operators should be same as that for equivalent PSTN based services. For VOIP based lower than toll quality service, the tariff has been forborne subject to the condition that it must be lower than the tariff for toll quality service. The Authority has also forborne with respect to tariff for Internet Telephony offered by ISPs over public Internet, treating this as a value added application of Internet service.
For full recommendations and more details, please visit the TRAI’s website at www.trai.gov.in.