Telco industry losing billions

By Easwaran Rutnam


The telecommunications industry in Sri Lanka is losing nearly Rs. 10 billion annually as a result of international calls being taken using the Voice over IP (VOIP) technology which enables a user to make an IDD call to a telephone via the internet.

The Director General of the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (TRC) Anusha Pelpita, speaking to Daily Mirror online, said that a meager tax is imposed on companies using the technology on a large scale but yet there are those who do it illegally resulting in a huge loss to the telecom industry. However he insisted there is no move to ban the technology.

Meanwhile companies who use the technology on a large scale have received notification to register with the TRC by the end of this month, an official who had obtained the notification told Daily Mirror online. Pelpita admitted however that despite the registration process it is difficult to locate and crackdown on illegal users.

“Internet technology is so developed there is no way we can really locate and crackdown on the illegal use of this technology. But we have advised heavy users to renew their registration with us. There is no move to ban this technology because we really can’t do that,” Pelpita told Daily Mirror online.

VoIP is a general term for a family of transmission technologies for delivery of voice communications over IP networks such as the Internet or other packet-switched networks. Other terms frequently encountered and synonymous with VoIP are IP telephony, Internet telephony, voice over broadband (VoBB), broadband telephony, and broadband phone.

Internet telephony refers to communications services — voice, facsimile, and/or voice-messaging applications — that are transported via the Internet, rather than the public switched telephone network (PSTN). The basic steps involved in originating an Internet telephone call are conversion of the analog voice signal to digital format and compression/translation of the signal into Internet protocol (IP) packets for transmission over the Internet; the process is reversed at the receiving end.

Read more about VOIP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_over_IP#cite_note-57