New Delhi, Aug. 18: The department of telecom (DoT) is in favour of allowing calls from personal computers to fixed line and mobile phones and vice versa.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) today gave its approval to long-distance calls routed through the Internet. At present, a voice call can travel between two computers but not from a mobile and a fixed phone.

DoT officials said they favoured the move, but an official announcement would take some time as the proposal would have to be discussed with telecom companies, consumer bodies and various ministries.

The move, if allowed by the DoT, is expected to slash STD rates further and open huge a channel of revenue for Internet service providers (ISPs), who would no longer need to acquire a unified access service licence (UASL) for operating telephony services.

“Tariff for long-distance calls can come down 50 per cent if the DoT accepts Trai’s proposal,” Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers Association of India (Ispai), told The Telegraph.

“For instance, we can offer STD at 50 paise per minute, while local calls can be as low as 15-20 paise per minute. This could bring about a new type of service — phone to phone calls based on the Internet protocol platform,” he said.

While Internet service providers have welcomed the move, existing mobile and long-distance service providers feel “the recommendations are against the basic principle of a level-playing field since they allow unrestricted Internet telephony to ISPs at no additional cost”.

T.V. Ramachandran, director-general of the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), said, “In the existing regime, where service providers have obtained a pan-India licence after paying a huge entry fee of Rs 1,650 crore, it is unfair to allow unrestricted Internet telephony to ISPs at no additional cost.”

State-run Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited said the entry of ISPs would erode the revenues earned by national long-distance licence holders, while private players Bharti Airtel and Reliance Communications want them to migrate to UASL.

Trai has also proposed that STD and Internet service providers would be connected through the Net and they would have a mutual agreement over the termination of calls on each others networks.

The decision is also likely to benefit service providers such as Vodafone and Idea, who don’t have a national long-distance licence and use the network of other operators. These operators can carry their national long-distance calls using the network of ISPs.