The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) plans to hold a meeting with the chief executive officers of all operators today. It is believed that the agenda includes asking the companies to ensure that their networks be audited once a year by international agencies for bugs and other security breaches.
The chief executives will also be informed that all telecom related hardware that is imported must be certified by test labs. During the meet, it is believed that operators will also be told to build their own capability and capacity to maintain and operate the network, preferably through local maintenance personnel.
Currently, the networks of Bharti airtel, Reliance Communications, Vodafone, Tata Teleservices Limited and Idea Cellular are outsourced to Ericsson, Nokia Siemens, Huawei or Alcatel-Lucent. Reliance Communications has outsourced its GSM network management to Huawei while Loop Telecom has tied up with ZTE for its GSM services rollout.
It is believed that outsourcing the maintenance and running of networks will not be banned but operators will be asked to play an active role in management of their networks, owing to the security issues associated with the infrastructure involved.
In 2010, the government had unveiled new security norms that mandated vendors such as Ericsson, Nokia Siemens, Alcatel Lucent and Huawei to employ only Indian engineers to maintain local operators? networks. However, these rules had several controversial clauses, including making it mandatory for foreign equipment manufacturers to put their software in the equivalent of a sealed envelope and submit it to the government, and were put on hold after protests by Western vendors and industry associations in US, Europe and Japan .
DoT will also share with the chief executives the new security norms, which will be shortly unveiled to replace the existing policy on import of network hardware. Besides, the chief executives will also be informed that the Centre has decided to make it mandatory for all operators to install the facility for location-based services.
This will require all operators to install advanced tracking devices on every cell tower in the country to pinpoint the location of any individual within 50 metres of accuracy.
