Belarus wants to charge for Skype calls

The plans of the Belarusian government to make international and long-distance voice communications through VoIP telephony services Skype and Viber paid for residents of the country have begun to take on real features. Most likely, you will have to pay for each voice connection via the Internet at the same rates as for a similar telephone call from the beginning of 2016, reports the Belarusian Financial News Agency.

It is from this date, according to the order of the Belarusian authorities, that each Internet provider will be required to store logs of all pages that its users visit. However, the state enterprise Beltelecom, which is a monopolist in providing foreign traffic to other Internet providers, decided to combine the mandatory with the beneficial.

According to the terms of the tender announced by this government agency, it is going to purchase a hardware-software complex (HSC) capable of not only recording logs of all web pages viewed by users in a log, but also separately charging different types of traffic, in particular voice traffic. Moreover, with reference to a specific user and his geographic location.

This means that if you are calling via Skype or Viber to a friend or relative, for example, to New York or Washington, then an amount equal to the cost of a similar call to the United States on a regular phone will be included in your Internet bill. And where exactly you called, the system will determine the IP of the called subscriber.

Recall, with the initiative to make Skype and Viber paid made at his press conference 18 in February, the Minister of Communications of the country Sergey Popkov. He lamented the fact that people, having received the opportunity to call each other over the Internet for free, stopped using the services of landline and mobile phone operators for this purpose, who lost a significant part of their profits.

True, then the talk was about “forcing the Skype and Viber companies themselves to share income. Apparently, their owners sent money-hungry Belarusian telecom operators in a logical and predictable direction, and they decided to charge ordinary Belarusians for calls via VoIP services.