Andaman and Nicobar will get access to online classes, tourism, banking, and telemedicine, says the Prime Minister.
Keeping Huawei out is hard as its offerings are cheaper than European rivals, and it has ongoing maintenance contracts with telcos here. Two-thirds of 560,000 towers in India run on Huawei equipment
Telecom Secretary Anshu Prakash indicated how telecom services had kept it all going during the Covid-19 crisis
Ask DoT to include service costs while calculating local content, value addition
It's been through dizzying peaks, troughs, policy U-turns, court battles, brutal competition, and daily controversies
Says industry may not have the appetite for it because of AGR issue
The decision will help ensure business continuity and employee safety, industry executives said.
Telecom companies will have to provide a point of sale code through a portal to law enforcement agencies, the order said.
Cabinet likely to take up the issue in its next meeting
The work was to be executed on a 417-km section of the corridor between Kanpur and Mughalsarai
For BSNL to be eligible for guarantee of Rs 8,500 crore, and MTNL to be eligible for guarantee of Rs 6,500 crore, the state-run telcos will have to pay a 1 per cent fee each.
The order came after the government this week banned several Chinese apps including ByteDance's TikTok, Alibaba's UC News and Tencent's WeChat citing "threat to sovereignty and integrity.
Sharing source codes with DoT will only create roadblocks
Given the high possibility of operators shying away from participation, the DoT is yet to decide on including the premium 5G spectrum in the tender.
The move comes following BSNL's cancellation of its previous tender, after home-grown companies complained to the government that the terms of the tender were prepared in a way to keep them out
In its affidavit, Bharti Airtel on Thursday told the court it had paid a substantial part of its AGR dues, seeking 20 years to pay the rest.
Payment timeline for AGR dues would be critical
The AGR issue is a 14-year-old case that had mobile operators locked in a legal battle with the government over the definition of of the term
The DoT also raised a demand of over Rs 3 trillion from non-telecom PSUs such as GAIL, Oil India
Source coding testing, they have told vendors, will be undertaken by third party labs accredited by the DoT