New Delhi, June 30 (IANS) In a bid to allay fears that telecom equipment from Chinese companies may be infected with malware designed to jeopardise national security, Communications Minister Kapil Sibal Thursday said that the government has decided to set up a telecom equipment testing centre.
Till then, the minister said, the government has asked several vendors, including Cisco, Juniper and Huawei, to share details of their telecom equipment.
‘We have decided to set up a testing centre in India. But we will have to set up the protocol on our own. We don’t want our security to be dependent on outside,’ Sibal said here.
The minister denied media reports of an agreement between the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and Chinese telecom equipment manufacturer Huawei to provide documentation and standards for studying telecom equipment.
The minister clarified that Huawei is not helping IISc to set up any lab, and the institute has already set up one as part of an old pilot project,
He said that the agreement signed between them was more like a non-disclosure agreement, so that the information that IISc gets from Huawei is not disclosed to others.
Government had recently approved a centre for telecom testing and security certification, which was earlier a pilot project at IISc, Banglore, to be scaled up to a full-fledged centre in due course of time.
The proposed centre would formulate standards and policies as well as provide facilities for testing, validation and security certification for various network elements.
The minister added that by October 2011, all telecom issues, including licensing, tariff and spectrum allocation will be taken care of.
