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With broadband connections on a steady rise, making calls on the Net has seen many takers. Home users keep in touch with their families and friends with simple and free software and a headset.  But what's legal and not legal remains shrouded in mystery, to most users.

In India, 128 ISPs have been given the license to offer telephony services. But TRAI says that only 32 of them are currently providing the services. If you want to make Internet telephone calls, you can use your PC to call another PC anywhere in the world. You can also use your PC to call a phone outside India, through your ISP, at a lower price when compared to using the telephone to make the call. In India, however, you cannot make a call to a phone unless it is in a closed user group. IP phones that run on the H.323 or SIP (Session Initiated Protocol) standards and which are connected directly to an ISP node, can also be used to make calls to similar equipment within or outside India. However, it is illegal to use equipment which is based on any other standards or technology to make calls. There are new devices out in the market which are based on newer IP standards such as MGCP (Media Gateway Control Protocol), IAX (Inter-Asterix eXchange). But the guidelines from the DoT do not cover them yet.

What all this means is confusion. And random limits on what providers can do and what they cannot. Not surprisingly, a huge grey market has come into existence which rides on an ISP's bandwidth, but bypasses the ILD operators and does not pay the termination charges. In addition, broadband users connect to international service provides like Skype, Vonage, etc and make calls to phones across the world at low rates. Most users do not know that there could be something not legal about this. Those who maybe aware cannot figure out why there should be a license for such services.

The users are not limited to homes. A newspaper report highlighted DoT's proposal to curb calls being made by BPOs using Skype and other unlicensed services. DoT has estimated  that these services provide upto 30 mn minutes of calls every month to various companies, especially BPOs. That is not an earthshaking sum at Rs 1 per minute but do not forget that this is just an estimate.

Another concern is that of monitoring the calls being made. National security agencies are authorized to monitor Net telephony services. Intercepting calls can be a headache. While it is possible to intercept IP calls being made to a landline network, it is difficult to do the same with IP to IP calls. Services like Skype also provide 256-bit encryption, which makes monitoring the calls very tough.

DoT, TRAI, ISPAI have all been highlighting these areas. Topping the list is educating the users about the illegal services they may be using unwittingly. But users are driven by cheaper and better options. Blocking unlicensed services in India is a suggestion, but can it be effective? TRAI, in its consultation paper, says that the rise of the grey market is because of the easy availability of easy-to-use devices for Net telephony. But can that be stopped?

The answer obviously lies in removing the artificial restrictions and having a policy framework that this form of telephony is here to stay-and will get progressively better. In the present scenario all but one are losers. The Government and operators lose revenue. The customer loses the benefits of a new technology. The only one who gains is the gray market operator.

Surely that is not the objective of any policy.