Telecom Lead Middle East: Telecom regulators in France and Saudi Arabia have put pressure on Skype, a Microsoft-owned VoIP service provider, to comply with local regulation. India is still silent.
Rajesh Chharia, president of Internet Service Providers Association of India (ISPAI), says Skype is not meeting Indian telecom regulators’ guidelines and “it is a threat to security of the country as Skype does not share details of its users with Indian regulators.”
Skype, the Microsoft-owned video and voice services provider on the Internet, is facing mounting regulatory challenges in Saudi Arabia and France.
These regulatory issues are yet to prompt senior officials at the Indian telecom regulatory authority of India (TRAI) or the telecom ministry to take action against Skype, Chharia told TelecomLead.com.
According to Chharia, since Skype is not a registered company as per Indian telecom regulatory norms, the VoIP service provider does not even share revenue with India government.
Microsoft-owned Skype was not available for comments.
India’s national telecom policy 2012, which will be implemented this year, will open up full Internet telephony in the country. This may put additional pricing pressure on Indian telecom operators such as Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, Idea Cellular, etc. Already, voice service has become a commodity in India and mobile service providers are unable to find adequate growth from voice business.
Two weeks back, French telecom regulators had asked prosecutors to investigate Microsoft’s Skype unit over its failure to register as a telecommunications operator in accordance with local law, raising the question of what constitutes a telephone company in the age of Internet-based communications.
Ovum, in a March 2013 note, predicts that from 2012 to 2020 VoIP will cost the global telecoms industry $479 billion in lost cumulative revenues.
The French telecoms sector keeps showing signs of strengthened competition across fixed telephony and broadband, where VoIP is increasingly being taken up instead of traditional voice services.
Ovum suggests that regulators must resolve the dilemma that seems to be the basis of the conflict between Skype and ARCEP: whether or not a player such as Skype can be seen as an electronic communications provider, as defined in the EC’s Directive of 2002. There needs to be more clarity in the way electronic communications services are defined, and a simplified and standardized framework where possible.
Saudi Arabia’s telecom regulator instructed mobile service providers to quickly ensure Internet-based communication tools such as Skype and Whatsapp services meet local guidelines. The announcement from the kingdom’s Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC) follows local newspaper reports last week that claimed the government had asked telecom companies to look at ways to monitor or block these services.
At the recently concluded CeBIT show, Microsoft COO Kevin Turner revealed that 33 percent of the world’s voice calls happen on Skype now.
Microsoft acquired Skype for $8.5 billion to increase the accessibility of real-time video and voice communications, bringing benefits to both consumers and enterprise users and generating significant new business and revenue opportunities.
According to readwrite.com, in the US, mobile carriers now concede that voice is a commodity, changing their pricing strategies to give away voice at flat rates and actively seeking new revenue opportunities through data, among other things.
Microsoft now owns one-third of that commodity, grossing (and netting?) far less per minute than the carriers ever did. Presumably this will shore up Microsoft’s already impressive collaboration tools, even if Skype’s revenue contribution – estimated at $792 million in FY 2012 – doesn’t move the Microsoft needle.
Bloomberg reports that VoIP service Skype is soon to become a $2 billion business for Microsoft, citing Skype general manager Giovanni Mezgec.
Baburajan K
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