No good news for VoIP in Italy
TelecomPaper reports on the new guidelines for VoIP in Italy as defined by the Italian Authority (where I wasn't able to find the original press release). VoIP will be subject to regulation if it principally is a PSTN replacement service (looks like PSTN, feels like PSTN, ...). Only P2P calls between computers will be exempted. I am wondering how that will effect e.g. Skype and their SkypeOut/SkypeIn service (would a solution be to break Skype into two legal entities to escape regulation at least for the P2P part?)
The decision, at least at it is described on TelecomPaper, is definitely a ruling in favour of Telecom Italia, which already offers Voice over ADSL with its "Il Telefono di Alice", so they can actually corner the market by leveraging their incumbent market power. For obvious reasons, Il Telefono di Alice doesn't include what would be call-by-call or preselection services in a PSTN world, and doesn't provide access to emergency services either. The new ruling however requires VoIP service providers to enable emergency number access, and nothing easier than that if you bundle it with a POTS line, and nothing better for your business than that when you are sitting on a pile of aging copper lines in the last mile and an IP-based core network using MLPS, that way you have the best of both worlds.
it's sad, very sad, but my country is becoming day after day a sort of "banana republic".
Posted by: Anonymous Reader from Italy | May 31, 2005 at 05:01 PM
I have noticed that my post has gotten quite some attention in Italy. I still wasn't able to find the original press release on the website, TelecomPaper was my only source (historic performance might not be an indicator, but they have always done a fine job with their research), so for the moment we are talking about rumours. The rumours however are justified in the sense that there was a meeting on May 12th (http://www.agcom.it/provv/determina_01_04_CODIP_riunione2.htm) during which regulatory aspects of VoIP were discussed.
Posted by: Lars | June 01, 2005 at 10:32 AM
unfortunately, nobody over here would not be very surprised if they ended up "regulating" VoIP technology to the benefit of the incumbents...
Posted by: Massimo Moruzzi | June 01, 2005 at 11:43 AM
errata corrige: unfortunately, nobody over here would be very surprised if they ended up "regulating" VoIP technology to the benefit of the incumbents...
Posted by: Massimo Moruzzi | June 01, 2005 at 02:41 PM
Here is the true story of VoIP regulation in Italy:
http://lucafiligheddu.blogspot.com/2006/04/voip-now-news-on-voip-regulation-in.html
Posted by: Luca Filigheddu | April 10, 2006 at 08:02 PM