If you are a Airtel cellular customer in India and use VOIP clients like Skype, Viber, Line etc. for making calls on your smartphone then some bad news for you. It appears that Airtel has silently changed its terms and conditions of it’s data packs and now it states that data packs can’t be used for VOIP calls (both incoming and outgoing calls) made through VOIP apps like Skype, Viber, Line or any similar app.
If you checkout the terms and conditions of the Airtel data packs (both 2G and 3G), you will find this stated quite clearly.
All Internet/data packs or plans (through which customer can avail discounted rate) shall only be valid for internet browsing and will exclude VoIP (Both incoming/ Outgoing).
VoIP over data connectivity would be charged at standard data rates of 4p / 10 KB (3G service) and 10p / 10 KB (2G service).
We reproduced the screenshot below. Check it out.
Cellular companies like Airtel must be tempted to get some money from users who use these popular VOIP clients to make calls bypassing the cellular networks. Even though cellular companies already charge for data that the consumer use, yet companies like Airtel are not so happy over rise of VOIP clients or apps like Skype, Viber, Line and many more.
We already know that Whatsapp may be the next in line to offer a VOIP feature and it will be interesting to watch how it goes on. This move may well backfire for Airtel. But perhaps they will be ready for that.
Usually, a policy like this may be good enough reason for consumers to switch away to a better network which doesn’t dictate what users do with their data connection.
Via: Telecom Talk
