Thomas K Thomas

New Delhi, Dec. 15

Security agencies' concern over monitoring third generation services is threatening to jeopardise mobile operators' billion dollars of investments. While Tata Teleservices and Reliance Communications on Wednesday agreed not to offer video calling services as part of their third generation mobile platform until the issue over security concerns are resolved, Bharti Airtel is awaiting security clearances for launching 3G services.

This comes after the Department of Telecom sent notices to the operators on Tuesday to shut down 3G services because security agencies were not able to snoop into data flowing through their network. Though the DoT had told Tata Teleservices and RCom to completely shut down 3G services, the two operators have agreed partially by keeping out video calling services. While RCom is yet to launch video calling, Tata Tele had already started offering it to its 3G subscribers. The operators sent their responses to DoT which is likely to be sent to the Telecom Minister, Mr Kapil Sibal. Industry executives also met top officials in Home Ministry to diffuse the situation.

In its notice to the operators, DoT had observed that law enforcement agencies could not intercept video calls in real time. It also observed that services such as Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, two way text chatting on the operators' network were not accessible to the monitoring agencies.

“It is further directed that the 3G services should not be launched commercially till successful demonstration of the capabilities and approval of the same by DoT. If 3G services have already been launched by Reliance Communications in any of the service area, these should be stopped immediately,” stated a notice from DoT. Similar notice has been sent to Tata Teleservices and Bharti Airtel.

Operators said that this could impact their revenue projections from 3G services, if the issue is not resolved quickly. “We have invested thousands of crores of rupees in buying spectrum and setting up the infrastructure and now we are told that we can't offer services. There is a complete lack of understanding on the part of Government on how this technology works,” said one of the operators.

Indian security agencies have been struggling to monitor communications services offered by new technologies, particularly those with high encryption. Earlier concerns were raised against Blackberry devices and telecom equipment being imported from certain countries.

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