The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has asked operators to enhance their existing capacity to provide call interception facilities for a minimum of 480 lines at any given time to security agencies.
The DoT notice said, “The licensee should ensure suitable redundancy in the complete chain of monitoring equipment for trouble-free monitoring of 480 simultaneous calls.?
DoT has asked operators to provide access for monitoring a mimimum of 30 calls simultaneously to each of the security and law enforcement agencies. Presently there are nine designated security and law enforcement agencies. In each circle, operators are required to ensure capacity for a total of three thousand calls.
Prior to this, operators were asked to provide lawful interception of 210 calls to only security agencies. The government has asked operators to make all the arrangements and bear the expenses related to engineering, maintenance and installation of hardware and software for call monitoring.
However, the government will bear the cost of each designated user, hardware and leased line circuit from the operator?s facility to the monitoring centre.
