ACMA to crack down on VoIP services

By Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 16 April 2008 15:07

Government Tech Policy

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has launched a three pronged approach to ensure that all VoIP service providers in Australia's burgeoning VoIP industry are aware of and comply with all the applicable regulation.

VoIP has for some time been a rather grey area for telecoms regulation. VoIP services that can make and receive calls to standard phone numbers are expected to comply with all the rules applying to the standard telephone service, but these do not seem to have been rigorously applied.

For example, since November 2007 any VoIP service in Australia that is able to both receive calls made to a public telephone number and to place calls to public telephone numbers has been required to support calling to the 000 emergency service and the 106 service for the hearing or speech impaired. Skype which with the SkypeOut and SkypeIn option activated should therefore be require to support 000 calls, but Skype specifically states that it does not.

The ACMA in December 2007 published the results of research into the supply and demand of VoIP services in Australia.  It said there were 269 VoIP providers but gave no indication of what percentage of current VoIP services are considered PSTN equivalent services. Yet much of the ACMA's VoIP regulation centres around this distinction.

Also last April the ACMA introduced a new 0550 number range for VoIP services that were are not close substitutes for a standard phone service. It warned then that it would "more actively monitor compliance with regard to the use of geographic numbers for local services by carriage service providers." Today's developments appear to represent the first real progress in that direction. CONTINUED