Jammu, July 18: With J&K still facing the ban on Short Message Services (SMSes), telecom service providers in the state have once again come under the scanner of the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) for “violating” the new guidelines.
 Official sources told Greater Kashmir that the DoT may suspend the prepaid services “permanently” in J&K if the telecom service providers, including state-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) failed to comply with the new guidelines.
 “All telecom providers operating in Jammu and Kashmir have failed to comply with the revised guidelines of the Ministry of Communication and IT, Government of India. They may face suspension of pre-paid services ‘permanently’ if they don’t abide by the new guidelines,” a senior official in DoT, preferring anonymity, said.
 He said, “The revised guidelines of DoT state that in case the compliance observed in the quarterly Customer Acquisition Form (CAF) Audit of any licensee (service provider) is below 90 percent after six months, prepaid services of the licensee would be suspended for a period of one week. So far, the compliance of CAF Audit of all service providers has remained below 85 percent in Jammu and Kashmir.”
 In trouble-torn Jammu and Kashmir, there are seven telecom players, including BSNL, Bharti Airtel, Aircel, Idea, Reliance, Tata Indicom and Vodafone. These telecom companies are providing post-paid as well as pre-paid services in the state.
 The official remarked, “Security is the top most priority for us and earlier bans on SMSes was enforced in view of security threat. If the compliance observed in four consecutive quarterly CAF audits is below 95 percent after one year of issue of these instructions, the services of violators (telecom players) would be suspended permanently.”
 The DoT functionary, however, maintained that there was slight improvement in the procedure for verification being adopted by these service providers.
 “There is also a financial penalty for violators, which is in addition to the suspension of the services,” he said.
 It may be placed here that Jammu and Kashmir had 56.69 lakh mobile subscribers, comprising 5.6 lakh postpaid and 50 lakh prepaid till January 31, 2011. The state government had banned SMSes following unrest in Kashmir on June 29 last year,
 It however, revoked the SMS ban on all postpaid connections on December 22 last, while prepaid services remained under blanket ban on SMSes.
 The Ministry of Communications had recently extended the permission for continuance of prepaid mobile services in Jammu and Kashmir, Assam and North East telecom service areas for a period of two years, subject to the condition that the existing security conditions and safeguards already stipulated by licensor would continue in place.
 It had also categorically said that in no case the prepaid mobile connections would be usable beyond March 31, 2013 on the basis of this permission.

Lastupdate on : Mon, 18 Jul 2011 21:30:00 Makkah time
Lastupdate on : Mon, 18 Jul 2011 18:30:00 GMT
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