What to do if you are a mobile operator and you see an app doing a better on calling charges than you? Ban the hell out of it.
Well, you may not do the same if you were in mobile operators shoes. But, Indian mobile operators have already done that.
A calling app called Ringo is being blocked by many of India’s major mobile operators. As the company announced on its blog, the app is no longer working for local (domestic calls) in our country.
The service is a fully legal, compliant service, and follows all aspects of the DoT and TRAI regulations. Please find an analysis of the same below. However in spite of being fully compliant with the law, the service allegedly seems to have been blocked as of half an hour ago (30th November) without any notice to our service providers. This is the information we have just received from our service provider.
The app buys voice minutes in bulk and then uses them to make calls for users possible. Without any special tariff plan, Airtel ( and most other telecom operators) charge almost 1.5INR. Even with special tariff plans, the call cost 40 paise.
Ringo was offering users charge of 19 paise per minute. Users do not have to be on 3G or WiFi to make calls. I suspect this was the sole reason.
After the company noted the problem, Ringo said that it is investigating the matter and it will try to sort things up.
We will continue to persevere in providing innovative voice solutions, and intend to take relevant remedial action, but do not have an ETA on the same. As it stands, until we manage to get an intervention from relevant regulatory authorities to unblock our service, none of our domestic calls are going through.
Indian network providers have already seen people going furiously with them on matters like net neutrality. It is a surprising step taken by telecom operators. Ringo has stated that they are following all rules of TRAI and other authorities.
Any telecom operator hs not made any comment on this matter till now.
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