Pvt operators may get 6 months to provide 3G mobile interception
The government has decided to give private telecom operators six months to put in place a system to provide interception of the GenNext mobile services — 3G. Home secretary Gopal K. Pillai and secretary, department of telecommunication, R. Chandrashekhar discussed the issue on Monday and are likely to accept the proposal of the operators asking for six months time to commit themselves on lawful interception of their 3G services, official sources said here on Tuesday.
3G mobile services mainly include voice call, video calls and data services. In the data services, operators are claiming to offer high-speed Internet service but are required to offer lawful monitoring facility to the security agencies.
The Department of Telecom (DoT) and Central security agencies have already made it clear to the industry officials that unless they put in place the interception facility for security agencies, they would stop roll out of 3G services.
The industry has, however, pointed out that the two state owned telecom PSUs — BSNL and MTNL — have been offering 3G services since the last two years and these issues were prevalent then also but they were never asked to stop.
“We are only asking for a level playing field with the telecom PSUs,” a senior official of mobile industry said.
Last week the DoT had sent a letter to both Tata Teleservices and RCom asking them not to launch 3G services on commercial basis till they demonstrate lawful interception facilities. The letter had pointed about that shortcomings in interception facilities of video calling on 3G services for the agencies need to be addressed before their launch.
According to an exhaustive note sent by the Union home ministry to the DoT, a demonstration was organised by Reliance and Tata Teleservices during which the law enforcement agencies pointed out that online delivery of video call intercepts “in real time” could not be carried out by any of the telecom operators. The service providers are pushing the contents of the calls in raw format to the server of the agencies, which require use of decoders to view and listen to them, the sources said.
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