IP Telephony in India: From Regulation to Reality

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I spent some time looking at IP telephony in India, while also doing my own setup for a few use cases and some fun stuff. As I went through this, I decided to document what is possible and what is not when it comes to IP telephony in India.


History

IP telephony in India is getting exciting after a long time. For those who may not know, India has been extremely restrictive when it comes to voice. Part of it had to do with the fact that until 2016, voice was actively sold on a per-minute basis and was a key revenue source for mobile operators. The other part has been regulation.

On the technology front, India has been open to VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) as a technology, but extremely restrictive when it comes to VoIP-to-PSTN interconnection. When I use the term IP Telephony in this post, I mean VoIP to PSTN/mobile network interconnect and not IP-to-IP calling, where both end devices are on the internet — like in the early days with Skype-to-Skype calls, later Fring, Nimbuzz, Viber, and these days with WhatsApp, Signal, Arattai, etc. Those were always fine, except that telco lobby groups have, over time, argued that they should be brought under the licensing regime as well. But better sense prevailed, and they stayed outside the licensing requirements.

On the IP-to-PSTN front, for a very long time it was not allowed at all. I remember there was a time when Indian call centres had two desk phones — one for India and one for the rest of the world. The Indian one would be connected to a PBX, which in the early days connected to a PRI and later to a SIP trunk. The global one connected to a separate PBX, which connected to SIP trunk providers in the US, UK, Singapore and Australia over the internet.

Later, things cleaned up a bit with the OSP (Other Service Provider) licence, under which BPOs could run full IP infrastructure internally (like they were doing for global systems) with the Indian phone network. There were strict limitations: a) the SIP trunk had to terminate over private last-mile access at their office building, and b) their system interconnection with voice providers over SIP had to remain strictly inside the building. They were not allowed to carry it over the internet outside of that network. It was useful for call centre operations, as they could now run more integrated systems — single desk phones, CRM integration and telephony — but employees still had to be strictly in the office.

Meanwhile, as e-commerce, app-based taxis and similar services became popular, a major requirement for number masking emerged. Providers like Knowlarity and Exotel picked up this requirement, and number masking became a major source of demand for them. This was relatively straightforward from a regulatory perspective, as they were doing only PSTN-to-PSTN interconnection. The signalling part was somewhat of a grey area. Whether signalling could be done over the internet or not was unclear. All these apps surely needed this over the internet. For example, Uber itself runs over the internet, bookings happen over the internet, and the masked number has to be shared through the app with both sides. The actual call would then run over the regular phone network.


Ringo Vs telcos

One interesting case I remember is Ringo, from 2015. It was a company founded by Bhavin Turakhia — a billionaire who made his money from domain names, hosting and SaaS. He created an app called “Ringo” which would take a request from a caller for a destination number, then signal both the caller and the destination number through a central system. It would first trigger a call to the caller itself and, as soon as the caller picked up, call the destination and bridge the two calls.

Ringo was able to charge ₹0.19/min for this when market rates were much higher (I think ₹0.60 to ₹1/min back then). He did a deal with Quadrant Televentures (the telecom arm of Videocon) and had a setup in Mohali which would do the call bridging. Back then, the voice call termination rate was ₹0.14/min, but only between mobile operators. If one leg was fixed-line, it was free. This ran for only a few weeks before Airtel pushed back strongly. There was even a case where Mr Sunil Mittal complained to the telecom minister about this, and it was ultimately taken down, giving the impression that even signalling over the internet was not allowed.

Bhavin later got access licences and tried setting up Ringo as a full-fledged telecom operator with VoIP. That also did not work out, with reports that they were unable to get voice interconnects with anyone except BSNL.

I don’t remember what happened to Ringo, but I guess they were struggling with the telecom lobby. At the same time, Jio started in 2016, making voice free and unlimited from day one and killing much of the business that existed around retail voice. Even Jio had its share of struggles with voice interconnect capacity as well as termination charges in the early days. Later, in 2018, BSNL launched BSNL Wings — an IP telephony service. While the service itself was pretty buggy and had billing issues, it proved that, from a regulatory perspective, IP telephony was allowed.

Later, around 2019, operators started working on VoWiFi and launched it by early 2020. That moved a visible part of mobile voice traffic over to IP at homes, offices, etc. Another key development happened in early 2020 — COVID lockdowns. As that started, more and more people started working from home and found that the limitations around the OSP licence and locally declared PBX setups had become a bottleneck. Eventually, they were relaxed. Mr Sanjeev Sanyal has covered this a few times in his interviews. Until that point, DoT had rules that were too restrictive to let employees work remotely. Eventually, by the end of 2020 or early 2021, the OSP licence as a concept was removed.



Present situation

Regulation

While it’s hard to say anything with certainty when it comes to Indian telecom regulations, I think at this point it’s safe to say that IP telephony is now allowed much more broadly, but with two key limitations:

  1. The IP-to-PSTN part of the call can be handled only by authorised access service providers. Anyone without a licence cannot connect IP with PSTN in India.
  2. For IP telephony in India, both legs of the call need to be in India. One leg is obviously in India for a domestic service, but the other end cannot be outside India.

So it’s better than what it used to be, but it still carries some restrictions.

While there are many types of licences, the number of access providers actually offering voice at scale is quite small. These include Airtel, Jio, Vodafone Idea, Tata Tele (TTSL), BSNL, etc. There may be some smaller ones operating in limited areas, but these are pretty much the ones with full voice infrastructure, DID allocation and voice interconnects at national scale.

As far as I can see, many IP telephony players are holding Access Licenses in India now but are still working closely with an existing telecom player instead of getting DIDs and doing full autonomous rollout. Take, e.g this list from DoT for Mar 2026, which has RingCentral, Webex, Zoom (ZVC India - Zoom Video Communications), etc.

I think, commercially, these companies have chosen to work with existing telecom players rather than do a full rollout, avoiding the cost of PoIs, interconnection negotiations, lawful interception and the other compliance requirements that come with running the network themselves. Few players also seem to be working with a VNO licence with access, e.g. Plivo, Telnyx and Zoho, as per this list. Since these are VNOs, they essentially resell telecom voice services with their own API layer on top.


Market

Domestic retail voice is largely a dead market for IP telephony players. At this point, mobile operators offer voice-only plans for as little as ₹1,800 / $18.76 per year. That works out to an ARPU of around ₹150 / $1.56 a month, with mobility and pan-India coverage included. So only VoIP players like WhatsApp-to-WhatsApp calling can offer VoIP as a free service on top of a free product that is monetised on the other side, i.e. the business side with WhatsApp for Business. IP telephony is a hard sell at such low ARPUs, especially when IP telephony itself cannot replace the need for end-user voice. All data plans bundle unlimited calling anyway.

But there is a growing market among businesses that need features like multiple DIDs and multi-channel trunks. Traditionally, these have been tied to the last-mile provider, which had to serve them over its own local loop. But with a newer set of API-oriented players, telephony can be delivered over any internet connection.

An even bigger opportunity for many of these players is voice for AI agents. The focus is increasingly on connecting IP telephony to AI agents so they can make and receive calls for marketing, support and other use cases. A lot of these players focus and specialise in the API layer. Twilio outside of India, is the pioneer of this & same model is being copied over.

Even infrastructure-heavy players like Tata Communications talk and focus heavily on Kaleyra after its acquisition of the Italy-based voice API company for $250 million in 2023. They don’t offer it in India yet, but given that it is Tata Communications, they could in theory, tap into sister company Tata Tele’s access infrastructure and launch at some point

Players doing IP telephony in India as of now include: Tata Tele (TTSL), Plivo, Vobiz, Zoho Voice, Tryvox, BSNL, etc. Almost all of these sell only to businesses. Pure-play telephony is still somewhat missing for SMEs at scale, and it would be interesting to see how it develops.

Also, as far as I can see, traditional telcos are actually not doing it. E.g Jio on their SIP trunk page FAQ on the local loop:

What kind of local loops support SIP Trunk service?

SIP Trunk can be delivered on Ethernet and GPON last mile; also it can be delivered on UBR in some instances based on interface clearance and link stability.


My setup

So I wanted a basic IP telephony setup for myself for a number of reasons. One was to get calls over the internet, which I can control, rather than relying only on the mobile network, which I cannot.
VoWiFi exists, but can be tricky at times. E.g., at the recent APNIC 62 at the Westin Mumbai, I was getting really poor mobile signal and could not use VoWiFi because APNIC uses its own IPv4/IPv6 blocks for the conference, and VoWiFi normally does not work over these temporary IPs. Mobile networks offering VoWiFi maintain their own GeoIP-based filtering, and that can sometimes be slow to pick up new address ranges. Thus, I find VoWiFi useful but with very limited control. A pure IP telephony setup gives me much better control in situations like these. I was also looking for some advanced options, such as having calls reach me when I am offline through alternate alerting methods, voicemail, etc. And I wanted a DID that I could share when I don’t want SMS or WhatsApp spam reaching my primary number.

So here’s what I finalised:

  1. Running a open source FreeSWITCH server at my end as the PBX
  2. For IP telephony I am using Plivo - ₹200/month for the DID plus pay-as-you-go pricing (₹0.38/min) for calls
  3. On the client side, I am using Linphone on Linux and macOS. For the mobile client, I am using Acrobits softphone on iOS.
  4. For security, I am using the usual industry standard: TLS + SRTP between Plivo and FreeSWITCH, and the same TLS + SRTP between FreeSWITCH and my clients. This ensures that both signalling (via SIP) and media (via RTP) are encrypted, though there is no end-to-end encryption once the call reaches Plivo’s underlying telecom provider, Tata Tele, as the traditional telecom network is not end-to-end encrypted.

My son & his fixedline phone

So until this setup, I had an old fixedline phone at home connected to the Airtel CPE for calls. My son rarely used it, mostly to receive calls from his grandfather. He could theoretically dial his grandfather, but never did because dialling an 11-digit number (0 + mobile number) was hard to remember.

Since I already got FreeSWITCH running, it made sense to connect his phone via an old ATA I had. This gave me an excuse to add a bunch of fun features using FreeSWITCH XML configs:

  1. My son can now dial 123 to reach me, and I can receive the call anywhere over IP (both endpoints are IP, with no PSTN involved).

  2. He also has a shortcode, 456, for his grandfather, which FreeSWITCH translates in the backend into the actual mobile number.

  3. I added a fun IVR menu for him that greets him, lets him enter numbers and plays MP3 songs over the landline phone. I was also able to use Piper TTS in Python to generate a personalised Hindi greeting for the IVR.

  4. I created special shortcodes for him which directly land on my voicemail & vice versa. This allows us to leave messages for each other. Quite useful when travelling around.



Grey areas

Indian telecom is full of grey areas. Babus seem to love keeping it that way. The whole AGR mess, regulatory overreach and whatnot. Until recently, the applicable law was the super-old Telegraph Act, which by design was extremely restrictive. It had a licence requirement if one was transmitting a message from point A to point B, which was an extremely broad definition.

As far as I can think of, the following are grey areas as of now when it comes to IP telephony:

  1. Unified Licence with Access authorisation for, say, Mumbai, or a VNO with Access authorisation for Mumbai, may or may not allow services to be sold outside Mumbai. I see some providers doing that and some not. One vague interpretation is also that if IP telephony is sold with just Mumbai access, then as long as a legally operating ISP carries it outside Mumbai (but within India), it is allowed. I am not sure about this interpretation.
  2. Location of PBX: If the PBX is at the end user’s premises, it’s clear and likely OK, but imagine the PBX is also in the cloud. In this case, the setup would be Telecom operator → Licensed voice provider / API layer player → PBX → End user. Both ends, i.e. the PBX and end users, are not licensed. One interpretation can be that the end user-to-PBX connection is the IP leg of the call and the IP-to-PSTN connection is still happening at the licensed player, and hence is OK. Another interpretation can be that it’s part of the overall IP-to-PSTN call and therefore cannot touch unlicensed infrastructure.

Technical limitations

There are some serious limitations in the current design, with one key being too much use of and reliance on existing telcos. Here are some limitations of Indian IP telephony design:

  1. Lack of number portability — there is no way to port a number from one provider to another, even though mobile number portability has been common for a long time.
  2. Lack of DID ownership by API-layer companies. Players like Plivo, Vobiz, etc. are all using provider-specific DIDs, and they would be locked to the provider because of #1, i.e. no portability. Ideally, there should be an easy way for them to obtain DID allocations directly from DoT and run their own network, just like we do in the IP world — autonomous, with their own IPs, transit and peering setup.
  3. Lack of IP-to-IP voice peering — in the US, it’s common to see large IP telephony providers peer with each other for voice over private cross-connects. In India, that seems much harder under the current access-licensing regime.

References

The following links are interesting and worth exploring:

Last but not least, special thanks to my friend and one of the experts on this stuff, Nitin Lochab, for all the advice as I worked through the FreeSWITCH deployment. 😀


Disclaimer: This is my personal blog, and hence, posts made here are in my personal capacity. These do not represent the views of my employer.