Why am I excited about Pigeon? [Opinion]

By now you would have all read about the relaunch of the MTNL (Indian telecom company) VoIP service in its new avatar, Pigeon. MTNL has been offering this service for about an year without any brand name. Realizing the importance of marketing and impressed with the response that MTNL received to its VoIP offering, the company decided to brand it. I must say, I am impressed with the layout of the site. I will not spend too much space on the details of the service (you can find it here), but I would rather offer a first hand review of the service and my comments on it.

My family has been using the service for some time in Mumbai and I can provide some first hand review of the service. Some key points:

• When it works, the call quality is great.
• You can use any of your existing telephone instrument to use the service.
• You do not use the data or time on your broadband connection.

Having said that, I would hesitate to recommend the service in its current form for the following reasons:

• The MTNL broadband connection is highly unreliable (at least that is how it has been so far).
• The customer service is largely non existent, so there is nobody to listen and act on your complaints (I hope with the relaunch things improve on this front).
• This implies that the Pigeon service is not likely going to be highly reliable.
• Pigeon does not offer sip SIP interoperability.
• You have to pay even for SIP-SIP calls.
• You pay Rs. 1 per minute, which is not significantly cheaper than what one would pay to call India (considering that you have to pay a rental of Rs. 200).
  

Despite the shortfalls, I am excited about this move for several reasons:

• It brings VoIP to the masses and thus helps penetrate VoIP usage.
• MTNL also provides installation support, which means user need not know anything about the technical details. This should greatly boost adoption of VoIP.
  
• MTNL provides legitimacy to the service, making it easier to sell.
• It is the first step towards VoIP freedom in India (a huge market for VoIP calls).
• But, perhaps the biggest reason for my excitement is that it will force the other private firms, including Bharti, Reliance and Vodafone to launch VoIP services.
• We all know what competition did to telephony in India (Indian telecom rates are almost the cheapest in the world) and I am hoping in the near future the effect will be replicated in VoIP as well.

Let us hope that this move triggers action from other firms and Indians can truly benefit from the VoIP revolution. If you have used the Pigeon service (in its new form), please leave your feedback for the other readers.

Technorati Tags: VoIP, Airtel, Pigeon, MTNL, Call India, Reliability, Cheap Calls, SIP