ABOUT 60 million minutes of international calls are made to and from Bangladesh a day and more than 35 per cent of these calls are still being routed by some illegal operators through Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). According to an estimate, the government during the last ten years has been deprived of Taka 90 billion (Taka Nine thousand crore) on account of lost revenues due to illegal use of VoIP technology circumventing the normal International Long Distance Telecommunications Services (ILDTS) from which the government could otherwise have earned revenues on those bypassed overseas calls.
A syndicate of PSTN operators, internet service providers and also mobile phone operators, who in most cases were backed by powerful elites, used their respective licensed channels to route the VoIP calls at the expense of the government; these operators may be termed telephone voice smugglers. A number of raids on illegal VoIP operations were earlier undertaken by the law enforcement agencies, a number of internet and mobile phone operators were punished by fines and the government-owned telephone organization BTTB had hugely lowered the charges of overseas calls with a view to discouraging such illegal business, but to no avail. Therefore, the government has obviously been compelled to take actions against such telephone voice smuggling by canceling licenses of five private land-phone companies who were found doing illegal VoIP business. But such sudden canceling of licenses of the land-phone companies has resulted in unexpected snaping of the telephone connectionsof innocent telephone subscribers and loss of jobs for hundreds of employees who used to work in those companies for no fault of their own.
However, it is heartening to learn from the Telecom Minister Rajiuddin Ahmed Raju that after a bill named "Telecom Regulatory Act 2010" is passed in the next Budget Session of the parliament, VoIP technology will be made open for all so that any operator can handle international calls through VoIP in a legal and transparent manner and the government gets revenues, however little, from every single telephony use through VoIP. Wage-earners, especially those whose poor parents and family members live in rural areas, will be benefited by the cheaper means of VoIP calls they can use to talk to their families.
VoIP has become a popular medium of doing lucrative business as the technology offers international calls at charges much lower than those calls made through conventional international telephone lines though the quality of voice through VoIP is not as good as that through standard telephone lines. But things of telecommunication are fast changing. Those who own computers at both ends of communication are now using many modes like chatting through texting and interacting through video-conferencing. If you are in Dhaka and your friend in New York have downloaded in your computers the free software called "Skype" you can call each other for absolutely free for as long as you like. The government should therefore formulate their telecom policy based on what shape the teletechnology would take in the future.
Cellular telephony has grown dramatically, and cellular phones are nowadays used even in our country as equipment for many purposes including texting, paying bills, purchasing household goods, listening to FM radio programmes, playing recorded songs, taking digital photographs and what not. The technological advancement of cell phones will not stop here. Future innovation will bring this magnificent invention to greater heights, offering more functionality than ever. The recent introduction of internet service through high-powered wireless connectivity in cell phones will allow Bangladeshi people to watch from their mobile phones live feeds of the World Cup football tournaments to be held in South Africa.
The day perhaps is not far away, let me fancy please, when there will be no wired telephone and maybe all the future mobile phones based on satellite technology will be as cheap as an FM radio set for anybody to communicate with anybody on the Earth, on the Mars or on any other planet absolutely for free.
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