September 2008 Archives

The ongoing tussle between India's security agencies and the department of telecom (DoT) on one side and BlackBerry's maker Research-In-Motion may be resolved; at least that's how it looks.

According to local reports, the Indian government has finally been able to decrypt the data on BlackBerry's local networks, a feat that has come after over six months of acrimony between the country and RIM. The DoT and security agency National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO) have conducted successful tests on local service providers like Bharti Airtel, BPL Mobile, and Vodafone-Essar networks for interception of Internet messages from BlackBerry to non-BlackBerry devices. And interestingly, this has been achieved not without the consent of RIM, but with its help.

According to an NTRO source -- who has requested anonymity -- the Indian government have successfully tested the decompression techniques that have been worked out on "some Blackberry" service providers' networks although the Indian government haven't started cracking the networks yet.

If these claims are true, they not only mean that all email messages and SMSs sent out of Blackberry handsets in India would be under government surveillance (and thus no longer be exclusive for the users), but I believe it would also be the first instance for a government being able to snoop on Blackberry data.

RIM's security policy that does not allow any third party or even the company to read the information transferred over its network, is one of the most redeeming feature of Blackberry, making it one of the world's most popular communication tools.

BlackBerry, the revolutionary push email service, has faced a number of controversies in its decade of existence. But perhaps never has Blackberry faced the ire of a country's government for the commercial arrangement it has with telecom operators of the country.

Six months back, the DoT clamped down on RIM for entering into a "routing arrangement" -- and not a "hosting arrangement" as required under the Indian law - with the Indian BlackBerry service providers.

A routing agreement allows communications between BlackBerry owners in India to be hosted on servers outside the country, thereby bypassing the networks of Indian mobile operators and directly hit RIM's servers in Canada. In a hosting agreement the data resides on servers of Indian BlackBerry service providers. Since a routing arrangement does not lawfully allow India's national security agencies to intercept BlackBerry data, DoT wanted either the Indian service operators to create a mirror image of all emails and data sent on these devices in India, saving it for a minimum of six months, or, for RIM to move its servers to India.

DoT believed that Blackberry had emerged as a "security threat to the country," because communications through BlackBerry devices could not be intercepted by anyone. Thus, it could become a favorite tool for terrorists.

But neither RIM nor the Indian telecom operators were willing to accept these conditions, and the growth of Blackberry in India was in a state of limbo as the industry feared that the DoT might ban Blackberry services outright.

Nevertheless, even as NTRO sources claim encryption solution that India has worked out is solely for the security agencies' use -- and not to be shared with any others -- the moot question is whether India is justified in insisting on snooping on BlackBerry data?

According to local Cyberlaw expert Pavan Duggal, although the Indian IT Act 2000 does extend the power to intercept information to the Government, it is not clear whether the law allows for such sweeping surveillance.

Moreover, "Right from consumer banking transactions to enterprises exchanging data between different offices to government organizations -- all use encryption technology in one form or the other," says Alok Shende, the India-based Head, IT & Telco, Datamonitor. "Any initiative to dilute the right of business and consumers to use encryption technology will perforce lead to increased vulnerability for businesses on one hand, and loss of privacy to consumer on the other."

Meanwhile, what is clear though is that the warring factions -- DoT, NTRO, etc and RIM -- have indeed been able to work out a truce of some sort. Two more service providers -- Reliance Mobile and Tata Teleservices -- expanded Blackberry's market in India by launching their services with the latest Blackberry handsets.

Photo by Phil Robinson Creative Commons License Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic

With over 270 million subscribers -- that's the second largest after China -- and adding almost 9 million each month, India may have wowed the world by becoming the fastest growing telecom market. But, in terms of another major development indicator, broadband penetration, India still has a long way to go -- a very long way to go in fact.

According to the International Telecommunication Union's latest study on Asia-Pacific Telecom scene, at close-to-zero level of broadband penetration India is far behind most economies of the Asia-Pacific region.  "India's success in telecom revolution is restricted to just mobile phone growth and that too in the voice segment while the country has very little to showcase in fixed line and Internet access, or high-speed broadband," says Vanessa Gray, the author of the report, entitled Asia-Pacific Telecommunication/ICT Indicators .

For a country that is the considered to be a global hub for IT/ITeS services and the world's back office, it is indeed strange that Internet penetration remains one of the lowest in the world. But for Gray, that is not really a surprise.

"There is a very strong link between income level and broadband penetration simply because broadband infrastructure is expensive," she says. "The per capita income of India [at about $1000] then doesn't allow the country to spend much on growing the broadband infrastructure and a low income level is also the reason why Indian government has a limited amount of influence on broadband penetration as well."

The other is big problem is the dispersement of population. About 65 percent of Indians still live in rural areas that suffer from very poor infrastructure -- like roads, electricity, etc -- and "that makes it very difficult to increase the level of broadband penetration," she says.

Moreover according to Rajesh Chharia, president, Internet Service Provider Association of India, "The dismal penetration could be attributed to a slew of other factors like government policy failures, inadequate of fixed line infrastructure, a barely profitable ISP business, and low domestic PC penetration."

Nevertheless, in terms of Information and Communication Technologies, Asia-Pacific is mind-boggling in many ways. It is home to almost half of the world's fixed telephone lines, and with over a billion mobile cellular subscribers, the region has the largest mobile phone market share globally. The other areas in which the region stands out most are, advanced Internet technologies including broadband Internet access and mobile data communications.

According to Gray in the region's high-income economies in particular, ubiquitous access is progressing through a competitive race to provide ever faster fixed broadband access. Operators in Hong Kong and Japan for instance have launched one-Gigabits per second broadband and triple-play services aimed at the residential market, featuring applications such as Internet telephony and television.

And Korea, which already leads the world in terms of the percentage of households with fixed broadband access, has also emerged as world leader in fibre optic connections, which is essential for supporting the next generation of ultra-high speed Internet applications.

ITU says that the Asia-Pacific region is the world's largest broadband market with a 39 percent share of the world's total at the end of 2007. In terms of broadband access, Asia-Pacific has made remarkable progress in the past few years, with subscriber numbers growing almost five-fold in five years: from 27 million at the beginning of 2003 to 133 million at the start of 2008.

But like India, not everyone in the region lives in the ultimate high-speed Internet access experience; and the contrast is stark.

"The regional broadband divide is striking, with poor economies having a close-to-zero broadband penetration, compared to that of rich economies where one in four persons is a broadband subscriber," says Gray

The gap in available broadband speeds between rich and poor countries is as wide as broadband penetration. In Japan, Korea and Hong Kong for example, the minimum advertised broadband speed is faster than the maximum broadband speed in Cambodia, Tonga, Laos and Bangladesh.

As far as India is concerned, the good news is that the low level of penetration is not going to last long. That's because, India has just released spectrum for rolling out 3G and WiMAX services-the next generation wireless technologies -- and those services are expected to start in about 6 months. "A lot might change once India launches its 3G network because that will help broadband penetration over the much cheaper mobile phone to spurt," says Gray.

Moreover, the 3G roll out will also encourage new operators, including foreign ones, to enter the Indian market. And that in turn could "stimulating competition, liberalizing the broadband business even further to make broadband access cheaper for higher broadband penetration," says Pradeep Baijal, a former telecom regulator.