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eFE (Financial Express), 5 August 2025
Forget The PC, Now You Can Call On The Net From A VoIP Centre
New Delhi: In about a fortnight, users in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore will be able to access Net telephony services at Net4India’s Voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) centres. These centres will attract those customers who do not have a PC or Net access at home or for some reason were not comfortable using PC at cybercafes, according to the company.
Category ‘A’ Internet service provider (ISP) Net4India is investing Rs 15 crore in the eight month-long project to set up 500 such centres all across the country.
Net4India has tied up with the networking major Cisco for the VoIP-based phone devices, where each device will cost Rs 15,000.
“The users visiting these centres will be billed at the rates similar to the rates charged by our Net telephony cards (Rs 5 per minute for a call to the US). Unlike Net telephony using a PC and Internet, the user here will not be charged for the Net connection or basic telephone,” Net4India chief operating officer Uday Sodhi said.
Bandwidth of 16 kbps would be provided to each of these phone devices at these centres, he said.
“In one centre, there will be two IP-based phones and in all a centre will get about 32 kbps of bandwidth,” Mr Sodhi said.
Net4India intends to set up a franchisee network for the bulk of its centres while setting up the rest of the centres on its own.
The company already has over 10,000 retail outlets in 35 cities for its Net telephony cards called Phonewala.com. The company intends to use these retail outlets for its Internet long distance (ILD) services as well.
Net4India is planning to launch its ILD services in October, this year.
To begin with, Net4India intends to focus on the retail segment by launching ILD calling cards.
The company is looking at selling these ILD calling cards through its retail outlets.
“Users can call using a basic telephone on a number given by the company, after which the user will feed in the pin number as on these ILD calling cards,” he said.
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