Bangladesh Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (BTRC), the supervisory body of the country's telecoms industry, is going to launch IP telephony service by the middle of the year. The BTRC has decided to award the licence to local internet service providers (ISPs) to kick-start IP telephony service across the country.

IP telephony is Internet Protocol (IP)-based phone service that is very cost effective compared to traditional circuit-switched telephony services. In IP telephony voice is transformed into series of packets and then the packets are transmitted over a data communication network. Voice quality in IP phone service is quite impressive and it depends on the traffic condition of the network.

IP phone service has two distinct categories such as IP deskphone and softphone. IP deskphone resembles regular phone set but incorporates more interactive features and use session initiation protocol (SIP) to transmit packets. Cisco is one of the market leaders in providing IP deskphone solution. Softphone, on the other hand, is a web-based telephony service that requires multimedia equipment to initiate phone calls. Skype is an ideal example of the softphone that uses point-to-point protocol to transmit data.