In the absence of a testing ecosystem, the companies urged DoT and TEC to pave the way for early mutual recognition agreements (MRA) between India and other countries for testing and certification of telecom gear.
Indian mobile service providers have asked the department of telecommunications (DoT) to defer the April 1 deadline for mandatory testing and certification of imported network equipment due to a paucity of labs to undertake such in-country screening.
They are likely to urge DoT and its technical wing, the Telecom Engineering Centre (TEC), to instruct customs authorities not to insist on the required certification to preempt imported 3G and 4G equipment worth billions of dollars from getting stuck and delaying network rollouts and expansion after April 1. Mobile operators import an estimated $6-7 billion of network gear annually, primarily for 4G networks, from vendors such as Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei, Samsung and ZTE.
Lack of testing facilities
Rajan Mathews, director general of the Cellular Operators Association of India, in an interaction with Economic Times said that that they have requested the authorities that the requirements of mandatory testing and certification of telecom equipment should not be implemented until sufficient test labs are established in India and all related technical and procedural challenges have been addressed by the government.
He further informed that implementation of the testing and certification norms has a very high dependency on availability of a robust test labs ecosystem. In the absence of a testing ecosystem, the companies urged DoT and TEC to pave the way for early mutual recognition agreements (MRA) between India and other countries for testing and certification of telecom gear. The DoT issued the testing rules in September 2017 and implementation was scheduled in October 2018.
The deadline was deferred twice, initially to January 1, 2019, and subsequently to April 1, in the absence of adequate test labs. A third extension seems likely with little changed at the ground level.
