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Comment by em-bee | Hacker News Reader

sure, but i as a user care about the tech, and what i am trying to say is that VOIP as tech for endusers is no longer interesting because we use video chat now.

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Not on the PSTN you don't. The PSTN is a parallel internet whose main difference is that you need a verified identity to connect to it. It also simulates circuit switching and costs a lot.

i don't get your point. that does not matter. what i mean is that as a user i care about the tech that runs on my phone, not how the connection is made. i don't make phone calls anymore. nowadays everything is done with video chat. neither PSTN nor VOIP offer that, so their use will eventually decline unless they start offering video. phone numbers are also a privacy nightmare. they need to be replaced with something that allows me to pre-authorize who can call me. this is unlikely to happen any time soon, but the point is that VOIP in particular is hardly relevant except in a few specific use cases.

What do you use - WhatsApp? That's VOIP.

that depends on how you define VOIP. strictly going by the term any voice sent over the internet is VOIP. but since PSTN can be routed over the internet too, that would be included as well. but i am talking about the system that uses a standardized protocol over a federated network with a VOIP or SIP client with a public address that allows you to reach any other public address on the internet, just like email.

whatsapp is a private network, not federated and only works with a whatsapp owned client. to qualify i would have to be able to call someone on whatsapp with a generic VOIP client.

this is comparable to googles text messaging system that is built on xmpp. it used to be possible that i could use any xmpp client on any xmpp server to reach people on google. at that point google was xmpp. but when they removed public access it stopped being standard xmpp but became a custom fork of it.

VOIP is any voice sent over IP. It can be the internet or the PSTN. I assume India doesn't forbid telcos using IP internally, because they surely do that because TDM switches are obsolete technology, but they Shall Not Connect to a public IP network.

so when india is talking about banning VOIP they can not mean any voice sent over IP, which makes that distinction matter.

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