Voice over Internet Protocol technology is all set to grab nearly 60 per cent of the international long distance market in India as more and more operators convert their traditional TDMA-based (time division multiple access) networks to an IP-based network, a study conducted by research group iLocus has said.

VoIP was legalised in India on April 1, 2002. In that year, 220 million minutes of ILD (incoming as well as outgoing) were shipped over VoIP equipment -- 6 per cent of overall ILD traffic. The VoIP traffic is forecast to touch 7.1 billion minutes (incoming plus outgoing) by the year 2007 (approximately 61 per cent of ILD traffic), according to the report.

Over 90 million minutes of ILD traffic were being handled by VoIP gateways as on March 2003. Data Access leads in terms of VoIP usage among the service providers, while Vocaltec tops the vendor list.

iLocus estimates Vocaltec's marketshare at 67 per cent for equipment and 83 per cent in terms of ILD traffic over VoIP gateways in India. Other ILD operators -- Bharti and VSNL -- use TDMA-based networks predominantly.

Another interesting VoIP market developing in India is the PC-to-phone Internet telephony market. According to the iLocus report, some 6 million minutes of PC-to-phone traffic are being originated per month by Indian Internet service providers.

Caltiger leads the market with 23 per cent marketshare. The report estimates PC-to-phone traffic to grow to 211 million minutes by the year 2007.

Among the PC-to-phone vendors Net2phone leads with 62 per cent market share.

The main reason for limited PC-to-phone growth has been the lack of sufficient bandwidth, the report said. An additional problem is slow downloading speeds for the dialer.