Source: Hueiyen News Service
New Delhi, December 01, 2009:
The deadline meets justifiably, The Telecom Ministry of India as per already indicated time today banned the services for more than 25 million handsets running without IMEI or on cloned IMEI numbers.
Officials at the telecom ministry said they had banned services to low-end Chinese phones without a 15-digit International Mobile Equipment Identification (IMEI) number.
The IMEI number helps identify all calls received and made on a phone and provides information on the manufacturer and the type of handset.
Most phones automatically register their IMEI with service providers when they are first activated.
The telecom Ministry official revealed the fact that the service providers are instructed to ban the services for all the handsets without IMEI numbers as they are untraceable and pose a threat to the security of the nation.
Customers owing such mobile phones were given two week deadline to switch a valid handset.
Alternatively the customers can manually register their phone with the telephone service provider and can buy IMEI 15 digit number just by spending Rs 199. The Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) had went about DoT as well as the home ministry attempting an extension becuase most customers who use these cheap Chinese handsets without IMEI numbers will not be able to afford a new handset said they were adhering to the telecom ministry order and providers were blocking services to the invalid phones.
"We had sought an extension of the deadline and since that has not been done, we have adhered to the given deadline," T Dua, director general of COAI said.
COAI actually wanted additional time so that such customers could get a software that would implant an IMEI number on the phones.
COAI had pointed out that while the industry had set up 1,600 outlets for implanting the IMEI number on handsets, additional time was required as they had to process about 25 million such handsets.
"We are aggressively rolling out the software which will give an IMEI number to all handsets.
We did seek an extension of the deadline on the grounds that we have been unable to extend the software to all such phones, but our request was turned down on security grounds.
The COAI has asked all its members to disconnect calls to handsets without a valid IMEI number from tonight," the industry body's officiating director general TR Dua said.
India is the world's second-biggest cellular market with more than 500 million users, lagging only China, which has over 600 million users.
In October, the India imposed a ban on pre-paid connections in insurgency-hit Kashmir, citing concerns that militants were using them to trigger bombs in the region.
The ban affected 3.8 million users in Kashmir.