Foreign telecom vendors, an unhappy lot
Telecommunication, in the last one decade has emerged as a potent tool for economic development and integrating trade and commerce in the world. The pace with which telecommunications has expanded all across the world has raised serious concerns before regulators and law makers. …. Read More.
In India, the telecommunication revolution started in 1995 and currently, India has close to 700 million mobile connections, with 10 to 15 million subscribers being added every month. Every jurisdiction has its own reasons and concerns including security, interconnect ability, taxability etc in relation with telecommunication. The dilemma for the governments is to balance their concerns with free trade in telecommunication so as to increase its economic activities resulting in creation of all around development and value in business, commerce and society. The four major aspects of World Trade Organization in relation with telecommunication are; be transparent, don’t discriminate, increase competition and regulate reasonably. India, currently, has heavy dependence on foreign telecom infrastructure companies and till date an arrangement, where Indian telecom service providers have been assisted by foreign companies in setting up network infrastructure, operating and managing telecom services, has worked very well. In fact, telecom infrastructure and telecom services shared by various telecom service has resulted in reduction in capital as well as the operational cost of the telcos, which in turn has benefited the consumers in terms of low call rates. India, like many other countries, has faced security threats in different proportions and dimensions, where technology and telecommunication play a vital role. Keeping in mind security concerns, the Indian buying cialis without a prescription Government through Ministry of Home and Ministry of Telecommunication has proposed certain serious modifications in its licensing for vendors providing physical telecom infrastructure and telecommunication services.
The changes suggested have posed certain serious commercial, technological, legal and regulatory hurdles for the smooth functioning of telecom sector in India. In the name of security concerns, Government of India has overstretched its authority by asking for sensitive proprietary information, which is at core of any company in the world. In the changed scenario, Government of India has not only suggested a mandatory signing of an agreement called “Security and Business Continuity Agreement” but has added an obligation of certification and reporting at vendor’s own cost. The other oppressive suggestions made cialis 2.5mg by the Government of India are; minimal dependence on foreign engineers, location details of mobile customer, network audit, organizational policy on security and security management. The telecom vendors and their respective governments have shown serious concerns in implementing the instructions issued by Government of India and have asked for a debate and discussion in relation to India’s security concerns. They have offered assistance in addressing the security concerns without hampering the growth of telecommunications in India. As per news reports Indian Ministry of Home has agreed to consider the representations.
Source: Money Control
The BlackBerry problem
“The discussions are still going on. We are not in the business of shutting down services. I am hopeful we will come up with some solution concerns of the security agencies. The deadline for Research In Motion (RIM) to comply with the security requirement is August 31.” the Minister of State for Communications, Mr Sachin Pilot, said on the sidelines of an e-governance seminar…. Read More.
“I think these concerns have been addressed in other parts of the world. I see no reason why the Indian Government should take any risk at all as far as technology is concerned,” Mr Pilot added. The final decision on this will be taken by the Ministry of Home Affairs in the first otc cialis week of September. Meanwhile, RIM and the Government are discussing technical ways to give access to data flowing through BlackBerry devices to security agencies. If this solution is found to be acceptable then the Government may extend the deadline for the company to implement the system. RIM said that it was myth that it has the keys to decode or decrypt the encrypted data that flows through the BlackBerry Enterprise Solution. It also said that locating a server or BlackBerry infrastructure within India will not aid the Government’s access to encrypted information.
RIM said the use of strong encryption in wireless technology is not unique to the BlackBerry platform. “It is unquestionably an industry-wide matter. Strong encryption has become a mandatory requirement for all enterprise-class wireless email services today and is also a fundamental commercial requirement for any country to attract and maintain international business. Singling out and banning one solution, such as the BlackBerry solution, would be ineffective and counter-productive,” RIM said in a statement. “The BlackBerry Enterprise Server security architecture was also purposefully designed to perform as a global system independent of geography. The location of infrastructure cialis wholesale and the customer’s choice of wireless network are irrelevant factors from a security perspective where end-to-end encryption is employed,” RIM said.
Source: The Hindu
Telecom market has weakened: Nokia India
Mr D. Shivakumar, Vice-President and Managing Director, Nokia India is probably facing one of the toughest telecom markets ever since he took up the reins of India’s largest mobile handset brand.
The past year has seen a lot of activity in the telecom sector in terms of new players, auction of spectrum, low tariffs.” If I look at the entire telecom ecosystem, equipment providers like Nokia Siemens, Ericsson will have a good time because they will get their orders on 3G. If you look at the operators, they are in desperate trouble as the new operators have cut price to such a bare bone that it’s hurting the industry. That’s why valuations are down. This has become value destructive. In the next two years I see a lot of operators dying. You already see senior managers leaving some of the new companies. Then, in the handset segment you are seeing an influx in dual SIM market. That’s where traditional handset-makers have been caught short And the final part is the applications segment, where you buy cialis tadalafil are seeing a dramatic uptake in applications as phones are getting smarter and consumers want more.” remarked Shivakumar on the present Telecom market.
“We definitely need standards. EU, America have standards, but India does not have standards for mobile phone. Issues related to radiation, how much plastic… should be addressed. Products should have a basic safety standard. Over the last few months, a growing market like telecom has been weakened due to value destruction by substandard phones, low pricing by new operators.” He added. Regarding the number of new handset-makers that have entered the market and its effect on Nokia’s market share, he said, “ Innovation cannot be outsourced. You need strong IPR and R&D team. Innovation also has to be relevant. Yes, the window of opportunity for the new players is in the dual SIM, so they are trying to grab that opportunity and nothing more. They advertise for a bit, but some guys run cialis dosage daily out of money.”
Source: The Hindu
New telecom rules raise many objections
Under the new rules, equipment vendors will be required to allow service providers and the DOT or designated agencies to inspect their hardware, software, design, development, manufacturing facility and supply chain, and subject all software to a security threat check at the time of procurement and at specified instances thereafter….. Read More.
“We deeply respect and support the steps taken to beef up security of the ICT (information and communications technology) network in India,” an Ericsson India spokesman said in an e-mail on Friday. “However we feel that some of the clauses are unprecedented,” he added. Ericsson has requested a dialogue to ensure that security concerns can be balanced with good international practices. It had reportedly sent a letter to the DOT, asking that it be excluded from the requirement that source code of its equipment be kept in an escrow account with the government. The new rules may not really achieve the security objectives of the Indian government, said Kunal Bajaj , director for India at telecom consultancy, Analysys Mason. The source code for equipment usually runs into hundreds of thousands of lines of code and investigating that for spyware, malware and security holes is not a trivial task, he added.
The new rules such as the potentially erectile dysfunction cialis unlimited liability on vendors and the escrow account for source code will come at a cost for the industry, such as costly insurance policies, which will have to be absorbed either by the vendors or the service providers. The rules were introduced after Chinese vendors like Huawei and ZTE said that orders placed by telecom service providers since February did not get security clearance from the DOT. Vendors are however unlikely to pull out of India in protest against the new rules, according to Bajaj “The market runs into billions of dollars, and we would not give it up easily,” said cialis cheap online an official at a large equipment company.
Source: Network World
SBI Macquarie Invests $304 million
A SBI Macquarie-led consortium today said it had picked up around 11 per cent stake in telecom infrastructure company Viom Networks, previously known as Quippo-WTTIL, for Rs 1,400 crore ($304 million). …..Read More.
SBI Macquarie made the investment from its $1-billion Macquarie SBI Infrastructure Fund (MSIF). MSIF bought the stake from Quippo Telecom. MSIF is a joint venture between Macquarie Capital and State Bank of India (SBI). “This is the largest and first investment made by MSIF in the sector. Other investments are being evaluated and we expect this acquisition to be one of the number of investments that MSIF will complete in near future,” said Varun Bajpai, chief executive officer, SBI Macquarie Infrastructure Management.
Viom is an independent telecom infrastructure company, with over 37,000 towers, and hosts around 80,000 tenants on its towers, taking its tenancy ratio to 2.2x. Viom plans to add another 20,000-25,000 telecom towers to its portfolio, at an investment of around Rs 8,000 cialis 5 mg daily crore, in the next two years. It has an enterprise value of Rs 20,000 crore. Each of the Quippo-led private equity investors have diluted generic cialis fast delivery their stake to make SBI Macquarie the second largest stakeholder among Quippo-led investors in Viom Networks.
Source: Business Standards
End of the Internet we knew
The publishing of RFC 2460 by the Internet Engineering Task Force which describes the Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), the successor to the IPv4 protocol that we’ve been using since the early 1980s, marks the end of the internet as we knew it and ushers a new age…. Read More.
Despite compelling reasons to move to IPv6, which is a large enough address pool that we could easily give every person on earth their own block of addresses, we continued to use IPv4 because the idea that we could run out anytime soon was largely scoffed at by the industry at large for years. However Internet users and the extent of their usage as grown by leaps and bounds the past few years. In the last several years, two key things have happened which have vastly accelerated the depletion of IPv4 addresses. One of which is the global rise of consumer home broadband, and the other the global rise and use of smartphones like the iPhone, the BlackBerry and handsets cialis discount price which use Google’s Android, which are being activated on the order of many hundreds of thousands per day.
The current estimate is that IPv4 addresses in the public address blocks will run out completely sometime in the middle of 2011 or early 2012.The depletion will inevitably cause some degree of disruption, which will be far greater than the disruption that was predicted with the Y2K efforts of the 1990s. The change will require a monumental effort. Beyond the device, operating system-level and application-level patching, there is also the immediately pressing issue that most ISP’s haven’t even begun the process of requesting their IPv6 address blocks from the IANA, and their respective transition strategies of re-mapping their networks to deal with migration issues are in their infancy. Implementing IPv6 will be a Herculean effort on the part of the technology industry in 2011 and 2012.
Source: ZDnet buying cialis without prescription
Stiff rules for telecom equipment imports
International telecom gear makers keen to do business in India acomplia pill slimming will have to deposit source codes and detailed design of all products and services they sell here into an escrow account in encrypted form. This can be accessed by security agencies and operators in case of an emergency.
The government has laid down stringent rules for telecommunication companies sourcing equipment from foreign manufacturers to address security concerns over gear. Penalties of 100% of the contract value will be imposed on mobile phone operators if any spyware or malware is found in their imported equipment, the Centre announced. The new rules will be incorporated into the license agreements of all telecom companies with immediate effect.
The new rules were issued after security agencies and the home ministry had raised concerns regarding imported telecom gear, especially those sourced from Chinese companies. Since February 10, the government has not cleared cialis order over 450 equipment orders worth close to $3 billion placed with Chinese vendors citing security concerns, slowing down the expansion plans of all operators. The new norms will also enable telecommunication companies to place orders for 3G networks following the recent allocation of 3G bandwidth to successful bidders via an auction process.
Source: Economic Times
Analog to Digital Broadcast Signals
There will be a complete switch over from analog to digital broadcast signals in the country in a phased manner by December 2013, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) Chairman J.S. Sarma said Friday.
Sarmasaid TRAI’s final consultation paper on digitalization will be released next week. He asked acomplia slimming pills the industry to support for the switch-over. ‘We are forward looking and proactive on regulation on digitalisation,’ he said at a conference organised by CII.
Welcoming the decision, Amit Khanna, chairman, Reliance Big Entertainment, said media companies have to transform from products to relationship with audience in the future. He predicted more event-based (FIFA World Cup, Avatar, 3 Idiots) things in the emerging digital world.
Source:Sify cialis no prescription