New Delhi: Millions of telecom subscribers (mobile and landline) will finally get relief from unwanted calls and SMSes from September 27. All those subscribers who have registered with the National Customer Preference Registry (earlier known as 'Do Not Call Registry') would get relief from all commercial communications, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) said. "...relevant clauses of regulations have been amended and the regulations are being implemented from September...
04:41 PM, Sep 05, 2011
New Delhi: Armed with the Telecom Commission's recommendation to hive-off 773 acres of surplus land with Tata Communications (formerly VSNL), the DoT will soon approach Cabinet for a formal nod to start the process. "A Cabinet note on VSNL land hive-off has been prepared and the matter will be sent to Cabinet soon," Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal said on a sidelines of a curtain-raising ceremony for the 'India Telecom 2011:...
02:57 PM, Aug 29, 2011
New Delhi: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) produced more evidence of corruption against former telecom minister A Raja in the 2G scam probe on Friday. CBI told the court that Raja used Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) to favour Swan Telecom. CBI said Raja forced BSNL to sign a deal with Swan Telecom for intra circle roaming and DoT officials who raised doubt on this arrangement were transferred. ...
06:14 PM, Jul 22, 2011
New Delhi: The BJP is now dragged into the 2G spectrum scam net. CBI's preliminary enquiry report indicts the late BJP leader Pramod Mahajan for causing losses to the exchequer and favouring private companies, as telecom minister. The UPA government's been facing the heat over the 2G scam but it seems the BJP may also find itself in the firing line. Sources say telecom ministers under the NDA regime are...
01:09 PM, Jul 10, 2011
New Delhi: Amid differences in the industry over major issues, including charges for extra spectrum held by incumbent operators and other related matters, the Telecom Commission, the decision-making arm of the DoT, will meet this week to consider the report of an internal committee. According to sources, the internal committee has accepted the various recommendations made by TRAI in its report on 'spectrum management and pricing', but on crucial matters...
12:29 PM, Jul 03, 2011
New Delhi: The CBI charge sheet in 2G spectrum scam will be delayed. Sources told CNN-IBN that the delay came after the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) gave a new report saying Loop Telecom was not a front for Essar. Sources said the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) will question the Department of Telecom (DoT) and MCA officials on this flip-flop. In 2009, the MCA had held Loop ineligible for...
08:12 PM, Jun 29, 2011
New Delhi: In the clash of the titans at North Block, Pranab Mukherjee has finally had his way - phone tapping for unearthing tax evaders - this despite objections from the Home Ministry and the Cabinet Secretariat. Post the Nira Radia phone taps by the income tax department, the Cabinet Secretariat had suggested the department be removed from the list of agencies that can tap phones. The reasoning being tax...
08:33 AM, Jun 01, 2011
New Delhi: Aditya Birla Group firm Idea Cellular on Friday approached sectoral tribunal TDSAT against a DoT notice to cancel its licence in Punjab for violating merger and acquisition (M&A) norms. On April 21, the Department of Telecom (DoT) issued show cause notice (SCN) to Idea as to why its licence for the Punjab circle should not be cancelled on violation of M&A norms. The company has also been slapped...
06:15 PM, Apr 29, 2011
San Francisco: A certain feeling is back in San Francisco. Murmurings of stock market riches. Twenty-something entrepreneurs as celebrities. Lamborghinis parked next to taco trucks. Driven by social media and mobile startups, the money is flowing in the city's tech industry again, a decade after the dot-com boom minted overnight millionaires and its crash fuelled a local recession worse than anything San Francisco has seen in the latest downturn. A...
10:16 AM, Apr 11, 2011
New Delhi: The telecom ministry has favoured audit of spectrum, allocated to various agencies and companies, by the government auditor CAG to ensure that adequate spectrum was available. "The fact of the matter is we need policies in place. There are no policies in place to ensure that spectrum is adequately and effectively used. There are no policies in place for audit for companies that actually buy spectrum. We must...
04:51 PM, Mar 01, 2011
New Delhi: The Telecom Ministry had opposed the S-band spectrum deal between Devas Multimedia and Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) commercial arm Antrix in 2007, two years before ISRO asked for a review. In an exclusive interview to Network18, Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal said ISRO had no power to allocate spectrum. "How can they handover the current spectrum which is to be handed over by the Dot? Spectrum allocation is...
03:27 PM, Feb 09, 2011
Washington: Iceland called in the US ambassador in Reykjavik on Monday to register its displeasure at a US court's demand for details of an Icelandic lawmaker's Twitter account, the US State Department said. A US court has ordered the social networking website to give up details of the accounts of WikiLeaks and of several supporters as part of a criminal investigation into WikiLeaks' release of hundreds of thousands of US...
12:02 PM, Jan 11, 2011
New Delhi: Blackberry has asked for 18-24 months to provide a complete solution for interception of its Enterprise Mail, but with a condition that its services would not be banned, a guarantee that the government declined to give. "Research in Motion (RIM), maker of BlackBerry, can provide the infrastructure in India for BlackBerry Enterprise Servers (BES) services in a time frame of 18-24 months provided it is confirmed that the...
07:55 PM, Jan 06, 2011
New Delhi: Several new telecom operators are likely to take more than 104 weeks time given to roll out services which may prompt the Department of Telecom (DoT) to issue show-cause notices for cancellation of licences soon. The DoT is looking at licences, issued in January 2008 by former Telecom Minister A Raja, which have failed to start services as stipulated in the licence conditions. "If you take cases of...
06:19 PM, Jan 06, 2011
New Delhi: Former Telecom Minister A Raja's private secretary RK Chandolia was transferred from the Telecom Ministry on Saturday as the Congress begins 2G clean up. Chandolia, who was brought to the Department of Telecommunications (doT) by A Raja, has been sent back to his parent cadre. He is believed to have been privy to almost all discussions on 2G spectrum allocation in the last two years. Chandolia's name figured...
07:48 AM, Nov 20, 2010
Bhopal: The former secretary of Department of Telecom, DS Mathur, has blown the lid off the 2G spectrum scam, claiming that A Raja was determined to grant a huge number of licenses from the day he joined office. Mathur, who retired on December 31, 2007 and lives in Bhopal, told CNN-IBN that Raja managed to advance the cut off date for processing the applications for licences in October 2007 itself,...
10:03 AM, Nov 13, 2010
New Delhi: The great Indian telecom scam is threatening to spill over into the banking sector. And at stake is the tax payers' money that public sector banks have given as loan to Unitech Wireless. The telecom giant, now called Uninor, is being probed by the CBI, the CVC and the Income Tax in the 2G spectrum scam. CNN-IBN has accessed to documents that show that public sector banks including...
02:42 PM, Oct 08, 2010
The CBI's affidavit will be opened and the government's final stand on the issue is likely to be made clear. ...
11:05 AM, Oct 08, 2010
New Delhi: The 2G spectrum case will be coming up before the Supreme Court on Friday. The CBI's affidavit will be opened and the government's final stand on the issue is likely to be made clear. The scam estimated relates to the allocation of a 122 licenses with spectrum in 2001 at throwaway prices causing the exchequer a loss of approximately Rs 70,000 crore. DoT had awarded 122 Universal Access...
10:45 AM, Oct 08, 2010
New Delhi: After days of uncertainty, there's finally some good news for over one million BlackBerry users in India. According to reports, BlackBerry’s controversial e-mail and messenger service will now continue beyond Tuesday after Research In Motion (RIM) finally agreed to lift the veil of user confidentiality from September 1. The government managed to force the BlackBerry maker to agree to setting up a proxy server in the country to...
10:09 PM, Aug 30, 2010
