Indian Government bans Skype and Other VOIP

the Indian government announced a ban4 today on Skype and other VoIP services such as Net2Phone. The government warned call centers and said they will face harsh penalties if they continue to use such VoIP services. Call center operators will have to furnish the names of carriers from whom they are buying bandwidth and VoIP minutes.

The Indiatimes says:

The companies will also have to give an undertaking that they will not use the
services of unlicensed foreign service providers such as Net2Phone, Vonage,
Dialpad, Impetus, Novanet, Euros, Skype and Yahoo. As per Department of
Telecommunications’ (DOT) estimates, these unlicensed service companies provide
30 million minutes of internet telephony per month to corporates, call centres
and BPOs in the country.

I simply cant understand when india says that they want to GROW in future. I guess the future will never come if they follow the guidelines set by Reliance and Bharati. The government is sold in the hands of these companies which are currently tweaking telecom regulatory rule in their favour.

Poor Indians.............Poor Skype user who bought those Skypeout minutes to call back Home.

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