A major Asian telecom operator began to charge a fee for VoIP calls

The multinational telecommunications giant Bharti Airtel Limited (better known simply as Airtel), headquartered in New Delhi (India), has changed the rules for the provision of services: now, regardless of whether the client has prepaid Internet packages, VoIP calls will be charged over them with a separate accounting of the consumed traffic.

It’s no secret that the cost of data services from mobile operators is not cheap at all, and therefore many of them, in order to attract the owners of modern gadgets, are developing tariff plans that include the use of the Internet for a fixed fee - the price for the user, as a rule , significantly lower than if he included the data service directly. This allows, on the one hand, to attract a loyal audience (a modern smartphone without the Internet turns into a reader and dialer at best), and on the other hand, the user gets the opportunity to use all the benefits of a permanent connection for much less money.

However, the presence of such programs as Skype or Viber, allowing you to make voice calls over the Internet, causes mobile operatorsdissatisfaction , since the volume of VoIP traffic often does not correspond to the calculated volumes of consumption included in the monthly fee, which are likely to be designed for normal browsing. This caused legal disputes and accusations on both sides, the most unpleasant of which is the threat of restricting VoIP traffic, which, in essence, means violating the principle of network neutrality.

AirTel is a large telecommunications giant that provides services to approximately 190 million people in Asia (2G, 3G and 4G networks in more than 20 countries, including Africa). Starting from the new year, subscribers of the operator who have prepaid tariff plans with cheap Internet will be able to use them only for regular browsing. All incoming and outgoing VoIP traffic will be charged as a separate service. Thus, a real precedent appeared in the large Asian market, in which one type of traffic is preferred over another.

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