Thus spake "Suresh Ramasubramanian" <suresh@outblaze.com>
There is another class of people who route calls out from the USA to India (or elsewhere) using VOIP, terminate the calls at an unauthorized (that is, not run by a licensed telco) exchange in india, and then route the calls out through the local pstn or mobile network.
Quite a few of the "call $asian_country for cheap" phone cards you find at ethnic grocery stores seem to work on these lines.
The local telco doesn't see a red cent of any settlement charges when this happens. Local telcos are, of course, all against this, and use any and every excuse to get these exchanges busted - a procedure that typically involves having the local police raid the exchange.
One method that makes raids difficult is that the landing site for these calls is often a satellite dish (for the international side) combined with GSM phones (for the local side). Sure, you can cut off the GSM phones one-by-one, but new ones are cheap enough that it's like a game of whack-a-mole. S Stephen Sprunk "Stupid people surround themselves with smart CCIE #3723 people. Smart people surround themselves with K5SSS smart people who disagree with them." --Aaron Sorkin