Starting next month, Skype to stop mobile and landline calls within India

Microsoft-owned Skype will discontinue support for calls to mobile and landline numbers in India. That means, a Skype user in India cannot call friends or others on their mobile phones or landlines from November 10 onwards, according to a new page on the Skype Support FAQs(Hat-tip to Medianama for spotting this).

However, Indian users can continue making free Skype-to-Skype calls as well as international calls to mobile and landlines. This does not affect people around the world calling into India.

Only those Skype calls made from Indian IP addresses to mobiles and landlines in India will be not be available. All those who had purchased Skype Credits to make such calls have time till November 10, when the feature will be scrapped. Skype’s FAQ does not offer any explanation on why this is happening.

The Indian Department of Telecom laid down new regulations in December for internet telephony service providers that are based outside India and do not have the license to offer internet telephony services within the country. According to the Indian law, an internet telephony service provider can either partner with a unified license holding company to offer telephony services or open a full-fledged office in India.

Smartphone users in India are shifting en masse to VoIP apps to make voice calls, and India’s Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) is therefore losing out. So, it has been in talks with companies like Skype, WhatsApp, and Viber on sharing revenue.

See: WhatsApp, Hike, and Skype could be forced to pay up in India