No tie-up with Huawei for telecom test lab, Sibal clarifies

Union telecom minister Kapil Sibal on Thursday clarified that no collaboration agreement had been signed between the Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Science and Chinese telecom equipment manufacturer Huawei for setting up an equipment testing laboratory.

He said in a statement that the union cabinet has approved an investment of Rs60 crore to set up a laboratory to test and certify telecommunications equipment used by mobile phone operators in India, of which the centre would contribute Rs50 crore.

''The proposed centre would formulate standards and policies as well as provide facilities for testing, validation and security certification for various network elements in order to render the networks secure and less vulnerable from internal and external threats," Sibal said.

''We are not collaborating with any Chinese equipment company to set up testing facilities,'' he added. ''In order to perform testing on recent generation of telecom hardware being manufactured the world over, IISc Bangalore had simultaneously approached several vendors (like CISCO, Juniper and Huawei) from the US, Europe and Asia to share internal details of their telecom equipment like detailed design document and internal architecture (both software and hardware), which are vital for detailed testing,'' he said.

For this purpose, IISc signed a memorandum of understanding, in the nature of a non-disclosure agreement, with Huawei, which was the first to respond, to enable access to its equipment and run checks on it.

''This decision (to set up a testing lab) has been taken due to the fact that in today's multi-operator / vendor environment, risk to security of networks and related services, possibilities of theft and misuse of database, leakage of secure and personal information passing through the networks has increased considerably,'' he said.