The Hindu Business Line : DoT unlikely to stop Blackberry services

Half-a-million Blackberry subscribers in India can breathe easy with the Department of Telecom unlikely to ask the mobile operators to stop the service. Senior DoT officials said that the Government would not take a draconian step by banning Blackberry services even as security issues related to it was being addressed.

“We have been in discussion with the mobile operators over the past two months on this issue. If we wanted to stop this service, we would have done it by now. There are some security related issues, which will be sorted with the service providers,” said a senior DoT official.

At present, Blackberry services are offered by Airtel, Vodafone, Reliance Communication and BPL Mobile. Tata Teleservices also wants to offer the service, but they were put on hold by DoT after security agencies expressed concern that they were not being able to monitor the data being sent through Blackberry devices.

Security agencies have sought access codes from Research In Motion, the Canada-based promoter of Blackberry devices, to decrypt the data.

DoT has called all the operators on March 14 to discuss the concerns raised by security agencies. “The Government cannot ask us to stop the service because if you terminate Blackberry then you will have to stop a lot many other Internet-based services on offer at present. It could snowball into a much larger issue and the consumers will be the ones who will have to bear the brunt,” cautioned an industry representative.

They pointed out that Internet-based voice service providers such as Skype, MSN and Yahoo Messenger were also heavily coded which may prevent monitoring by security agencies.

The Indian Internet Service Providers had earlier told DoT that the services being offered on the Internet could prove to be a threat to national security with no monitoring being done.

However, DoT has not taken any action on these firms so far, making a selective banning of Blackberry highly unlikely.

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