Anyuser Telecom, an Indian Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) leader and a subsidiary of the Korea-based Anyuser.net, has slashed its international long distance call rates to all countries.
Now calling the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada will cost Indian users only Rs 0.89 per minute, down from the current Rs 1.39 per minute.
The company has also reduced its rates by 50 per cent to Australia, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and the SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) and European nations.
The new tariffs came into effect from October 4.
The company said that a customer can avail of the best rates for calling international location from India by placing a call to any phone in the world from either a PC r through a special IP phone from Anyuser Telecom. A prepaid card in denominations of Rs 110/275/550/1100 is easily available at over 3,500 retail outlets across the country.
These rates, said a company statement, are all inclusive and do not carry any additional charge. The service is free of any rental charge and includes a 10.2 per cent service tax levied by the government.
What is IP Telephony
IP Telephony is the combination of hardware and software that enables people to use the Internet as the transmission medium for telephone calls.
For users who have Internet access, Internet telephony essentially provides telephone calls anywhere in the world with low cost, utilising VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) technology.
Why migrate to IP? -- Connecting traditional voice, video and data over IP/Ethernet/MPLS networks has become an attractive alternative to running parallel voice and data networks. It saves money on call and leased-line service charges, while consolidating management, cutting maintenance costs, and increasing user productivity.
This is achieved by converging two important traffic types onto one infrastructure and takes advantage of the simplicity and efficiency of IP routing and Ethernet switching.
Benefits: The merits of VoIP based services, compared with traditional TDM and leased-line based solutions lie in the compression and packetisation of the voice traffic (enabling cost-effective transmission), as well as in the switched architecture that further optimises switch resources and allows for effective service oversubscription. Voice switching is particularly important in environments where the existing PBX/switch facilities are inadequate. It is of lesser importance in typical trunking applications with denser traffic, where the added value of switching can be outweighed by the simplicity of a non-switched solution.
Future: While VoIP is constantly growing, carrier conservatism and a tremendous installed base of feature-rich legacy PBXs in the enterprise environment will cap VoIP growth rate in the short term until either economics change, technology issues are resolved and/or existing equipment is depreciated. This creates an opportunity for a more evolutionary solution that will benefit from the merits of both worlds: the quality of service and rich feature set of yesterday's technology, with the cost effectiveness of tomorrow's backbones.
