By Vipin Agnihotri
The Indian government objection over Tata Teleservices application for giving advanced BlackBerry services has left other mobile operators already offering this service unnerved. According to my estimate, any blanket ban on the service could have an impact on around five-lakh subscribers who at present are using the BlackBerry service. This development has brought into fray other service providers who provide identical facilities.
BlackBerry is a product of Canadian firm ‘Research In Motion’ (RIM) and it is a patented service that offers wireless e-mail solution to mobile professionals and individuals. I have a talk with top officials of Indian home ministry and they are interested in getting access to all communications made through a mobile device at any given time.
This is not the case with BlackBerry device at this moment of time that works with the help of a server. Furthermore, data is transferred in an encrypted format. Point to be noted here is that Blackberry does not allow for any interception, therefore Indian government seeing BlackBerry as a security threat, more so in the present scenario where terrorist organizations are taking the assistance of World Wide Web to communicate.
While leading mobile operators such as Bharti Airtel, Vodafone-Essar and Reliance Communications are already giving BlackBerry services; denial to Tata Teleservices in my opinion will not only have an impact on the telecom market growth but also widen differences between number of operators.
As a matter of fact, Tata Teleservices has already sought a clarification from the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) as to why they are the one who has got a refusal while others are running the services without any hassle. Taking this into account, DoT has written a letter to other BlackBerry service providers stating that they will have to give monitoring facility for lawful interception of data transferred through the device.
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