Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) is reportedly in the process of implementing fee for apps like WhatsApp, Viber, Skype etc.<\/p>\n
According to a report by Business Today, TRAI held a seminar to initiate the process to bring in a regulation for over-the-top (OTT) companies or providers of apps like WhatsApp and Viber to pay connectivity charges to telecom companies and share revenue with the government as well.<\/p>\n
The seminar discussed the impact of OTT on telecom services providers and their counter measures, legal and regulatory framework for OTT. However, the report further points out it may not pose major restrictions on such apps.<\/p>\n
With the rise of apps like WhatsApp and Viber, SMSes and even phone calls are on the decline. These apps run on telecom\u2019s bandwidth without being connected to the telecom industry. Several telecom operator including Airtel, Vodafone and Idea, reportedly want these app providers to pay a connectivity charge since these apps replace their core revenue streams such as SMSes and voice calls.<\/p>\n
It is reported that, telecom companies lose around Rs 5,000 crore annually because of such free apps and the figure is expected to cross Rs 16,400 crore in the next two years as mobile subscribers using smartphone with internet are growing rapidly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) is reportedly in the process of implementing fee for apps like WhatsApp, Viber, Skype etc. According to a report by Business Today, TRAI held a seminar to initiate the process to bring in a regulation for over-the-top (OTT) companies or providers of apps like WhatsApp and Viber to pay […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":20072,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[152],"class_list":["post-20067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","tag-trai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/entecity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20067"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/entecity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/entecity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entecity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entecity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20067"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/entecity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20067\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entecity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/entecity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entecity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entecity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}