tech2 News Staff

Airtel has gone ahead and announced its VoIP data pack. The VoIP pack will cost prepaid Airtel customers Rs 75 for 75MB of data over a 28-day period. While customers are still feeling like Airtel is being unfair, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) chief Rahul Khullar says that Airtel cannot be faulted for charging separately for VoIP plans as there is no set rule or any frame work which states that net neutrality should be maintained.

Speaking to The Financial Express, Khullar expressed that while the move is not in accordance with net neutrality, Airtel's move did not smack of any kind of illegality.

Khullar mentioned that going forward, event the over-the-top (OTT) services such as WhatsApp, Line, WeChat and so on would be put under some kind of regulation.

“If the telecom players fall under a set of rules, then should not the OTT players be also brought under some kind of rules? Otherwise there would be a non-level playing field,” he said to the newspaper.

Khullar suggested that there were two options to go about OTT services regulation. Either there could be licensing norms, wherein they pay a licensing fee to the government of a revenue sharing basis. The other way would be to put a termination charge on call going through service such as Skype or Viber. This means that the mobile network, on which VoIP calls are made by these services, needs to be paid a certain fee. This, according to Khullar, would bypass the need for a separate data pack for VoIP calling.

Khullar told Financial Express that all these suggestions would be debated through the consultation paper which should be out next month.