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G. Rambabu

Almost 50 per cent of the voice traffic from call centres bypasses the legitimate ILD operators and are being used to route ISD traffic to foreign destination. The outgoing traffic by this route is estimated at 100 million minutes per month.

NEW DELHI, April 17

EVEN as international long distance operators (ILDO) are vying with each other to grab their share of the ISD pie estimated at over a billion minutes per year, their efforts are being frustrated by a thriving "grey" market that not only chips away at their legitimate revenues, but also poses a security threat to the country.

According to industry sources, even as the ISD tariffs have fallen by close to 50 per cent over the past one year, there has been no noticeable change in the traffic volumes of all the three ILD operators — Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd, Bharti Telesonic and Data Access Ltd — over the past couple of months.

Alarmed at this surprising trend, a couple of them did some spadework, and came up with some interesting findings.

The fall in tariffs has certainly led to an increase in traffic, but not on the networks of the legitimate operators.

The "illegal" operators thriving across the country have slashed their call charges even lower, both on incoming and outgoing traffic.

As far as incoming traffic is concerned, some resellers of ILD minutes abroad have tie-ups with illegal exchange operators in India, who receive calls in the country and then transmit them to the illegal exchange operators.

Therefore, the operators abroad do not pay any revenue share to the legal ILD operators such as VSNL, Data Access and Bharti. They also do not pay interconnection charges to the basic operators such as Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) for routing their calls.

The total loss on this count is alone estimated to be over Rs 1,000 crore per year.

Then comes the outgoing ISD traffic. Here, the grey market is mainly the outcome of the Internet telephony service provider (ITSP) licence issued by the Department of Telecommunications, which does not have adequate safeguards to stop illegal routing of calls.

The sources noted that many of the call centres across the country have picked up an ITSP licence that allows them to route traffic on a voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) network to an Internet point abroad.

Almost 50 per cent of the voice traffic from call centres bypasses the legitimate ILD operators, and are being used to route ISD traffic to foreign destinations. The outgoing traffic by this route is estimated at 100 million minutes per month.

There has been little action on the part of DoT and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India to correct the situation.

"The issue has been brought to the attention of DoT and TRAI, but neither is willing to take any steps. In fact, this could prove to be a serious security breach for the country, as none of this illegal voice traffic can be monitored,'' industry sources said.

With Reliance and BSNL due to start ILD operations in the near future, there will be five ILD operators in the country competing with each other for the ISD market. However, unless the grey market is tackled suitably, all of them may end up losers in this telecom game, the sources said.

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