A government panel including representatives from the Intelligence Bureau and the defence ministry has allowed Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) to place equipment orders with lowest bidder Huawei for only the southern states. Citing security reasons, DoT has stated that equipment from Chinese vendors cannot be utilised in international border areas and has advised operators to deploy equipment from multiple vendors in order to reduce the dependence on a single supplier.
As expected, DoT’s move has met with strong opposition from mobile operators. A ban on Chinese vendors would be detrimental to their business, they feel, as most have a procurement deal with Huawei and ZTE. Also, Chinese vendors provide a cheaper option for equipment procurement vis-? -vis European companies such as Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Networks.
Operators have, however, agreed to certain security measures suggested by DoT. These include asking all foreign vendors offering managed services to obtain security clearances from the Ministry of Home Affairs after every two years of operation; ensuring that an extensive security audit is carried out on all systems irrespective of origin of manufacturing so that the network is free from trapdoors making it susceptible to remote tracking. Each operator is to develop a network and disaster recovery management plan. DoT has also stated that operators can outsource network management provided they are strictly monitored by security agencies.
DoT also plans to revive a proposal that envisaged products of all foreign equipment vendors passing stringent security tests in a government-controlled test bed before being sold. This test centre would be modelled after the China Information Technology Certification Centre. If the proposal is cleared the Telecom Engineering Centre will set up the test bed, Telecom Testing and Security Certification Centre.
